Love Lyrics.—The subject of the Elizabethan sonnets is usually love. Sir Philip Sidney wrote many love sonnets, the best of which is the one beginning:—
"With how sad steps. O Moon, thou climb'st the Skies!"
Edmund Spencer composed fifty-eight sonnets in one year to chronicle his varied emotions as a lover. We may find among Shakespeare's 154 sonnets some of the greatest love lyrics in the language, such, for instance, as CXVI., containing the lines:—
"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds";
or, as XVIII.:—
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease bath all too short a date.
* * * * *
But thy eternal summer shall not fade."
Sonnets came to be used in much the same way as a modern love letter or valentine. In the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, sonnets were even called "merchantable ware." Michael Drayton (1563-1631), a prolific poet, author of the Ballad of Agincourt, one of England's greatest war songs, tells how he was employed by a lover to write a sonnet which won the lady. Drayton's best sonnet is, Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part.
Outside of the sonnets, we shall find love lyrics in great variety.
One of the most popular of Elizabethan songs is Ben Jonson's:—
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine."
The Elizabethans were called a "nest of singing birds" because such songs as the following are not unusual in the work of their minor writers:—