Relate Elizabeth I’s poem, On Monsieur’s Departure (Reading 19.4), to her personality and mind-set.

What will be an ideal response?

The poem is a candid statement of the tension between Elizabeth’s personal and political lives. Her position as queen forces her to hide her true feelings for her lover, but she expresses them fully in the poem. Elizabeth uses several elaborate and witty images, which would become characteristic of the poetry of the Elizabethan age. Here, the poet’s “care,” first referred to in line 7, is both the feelings that she says, in line 1, she “dare not show” and also her lover. When she says, in line 15, “Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind,” she invites her lover to spurn her and thus relieve her of her feelings. This reversal of expectation is a standard Elizabethan poetic practice. In the final couplet, the word die is standard wordplay as well, referring not only to literal death but also to sexual orgasm.