kelleyjburke-qoumt

From Individual Hubris to Cupid’s Arrow:

A Textual Analysis of Elizabeth I’s “When I Was Fair and Young”

Queen Elizabeth I’s lyric poem, “When I Was Fair and Young,” was likely composed in the early 1580s, and has not often been read as the speaker’s prideful dismissal of suitors as the engine of her isolation. I did find one obscure journal article that made mention of the fact that Elizabeth was indeed the author only to be hit by Cupid’s lead arrow in defeat. My own initial close reading followed this trajectory as I read the poem as a confession from a Queen who “did scorn them all” and grew “prouder,” becoming the author of her own loneliness through her own stubbornness of heart. Yet, as I close read the poem again and again, finding it’s refrain structure, the positioning of the speakers, and the use of Ovidian mythological apparatus, it revealed that what I had attributed to the speaker’s own character was, in fact, the work of Cupid’s two arrows. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cupid wields his golden arrow to inflame desire and a leaden one to extinguish it. Elizabeth I’s poem is constructed in a two action scenes where the golden arrow produces the desirability of suitors, along with the hubris that comes with such overwhelming desire. The second scene unfolds with the leaden arrow delivering the regret and repentance that did not lead to relief in the final stanza. This essay will examine the literary techniques used, arguing that it is Cupid and not the speaker, who is the true architect of the poem’s fateful ending. This is the precipice on which my earlier hubris-centered claim and reading failed to comprehend.

The poem’s first two stanza’s give us a picture of the conditions that Cupid’s golden arrow has inflicted upon the writer, even though Cupid does not appear in the first two stanzas.  The opening line, “When I was fair and young, then favor graced me,” paints a picture of the speaker’s beauty and the adoration of many who saw her. The word “grace” here is more passive in that it is a gift given and not earned, thus showing the author is not the speaker. If taken in through an Ovidian lens, this grace is the golden arrow’s doing. The speaker is an object of desire and the “many” who “pine with woe” and have “sighing hearts” are the direct consequence of Cupid’s arrow. While my initial claim was one of a Petrarchan conceit, it falls by the wayside when studied with an Ovidian eye. The speaker’s pride, then, is an unintended consequence and not a character flaw. This secondary effect of the golden arrow’s power – as the speaker is endlessly pursued, she grows more dismissive and scornful of their advances. The refrain, “Go, go, go seek some otherwhere; importune me not more,” speaks of a monarch who Bell describes as someone who “strives to influence, cajole, or challenge, or answer. The refrain articulates and epitomizes the ways in which the same words can acquire very different and even opposing meanings as the context and point of view change” (Bell xii). In each use of the word “go,” the speaker dismisses a courtly negotiation in three syllables. The caesura before “importune me no more” causes a break and appears to give finality and closure. Here we see the speaker’s agency – but that agency, as the Ovidian framework implies, was not the speaker, but Cupid’s alone to give in the first place.

The second stanza continues to scaffold the golden arrow’s framework using the rhetorical concept of anaphora. The lines “How many weeping eyes,” and “How many sighing hearts” shows the building up of the devastation that the speaker has inflicted emotionally. The words “How many” reflect that devastation to be infinite, such that she says “I have no skill to show.” This rhetorical reflection is at once one of modesty and humility, with an afternote of sovereign power and agency. It is this use of occupatio that Frye argues that Elizabeth fought to control her public image “by asserting her political self-sufficiency by redefining feminine attributes like her virginity” she used that “defense as a means to control (Frye 1). This stanza is not only the Petrarchan speaker’s position, but she narrates her own reasoning in producing suffering for the unrequited love. This is Cupid’s golden arrow at its best; it enchants the speaker, which produces hubris, “But I the prouder grew,” and the speaker believes herself to be in control. My initial reading looked to pride as causation, but a closer read and further research revealed that the golden arrow is what is most dangerous here, not the hubris that is serves as collateral damage. 

It is in the third stanza where the decisive volta shows Cupid’s heartless countermove with the leaden arrow. With “fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy,” a new speaker comes into view, adding another voice to the singular speaker. Here Cupid turns the speaker’s words against herself when he declares “I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more/Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere, importune me no more.” That Cupid brings irony to the words spoken shows how he removes the speaker’s own authority in her words. Here we see Cupid’s plucking of the speaker’s “plumes” as the lead arrow in action. Looking at the stanza through the Ovidian lens, this was not mere punishment, but the continuation of the mythological framework and design. The golden arrow made the speaker desirable and therefore proud; the leaden arrow strips that away and replaces it with regret and a restlessness that cannot be quenched. What I read as Elizabeth’s agency in the first two stanzas, was not her own, but Cupid’s to give and remove. 

The fourth stanza focuses more on the leaden arrow’s physical work in the speaker’s psyche. The refrain began as a command layered in pride, yet it falls into disarray under the weight of the leaden arrow. The transformation is immediate in the line “As soon as he had said,” showing that the change is not a psychological one, but mythological. Immediately the leaden arrow reeks its havoc in the body, “such change grew in my breast/That neither night nor day since that, I could take any rest.” Even in the speaker’s repentance, it is not the moral failing of the speaker, but the leaden arrow’s extinguishing of the desires the golden arrow created. In Petrarchan poetry, the lady is silent yet unattainable by the man, but here the speaker uses Petrarchan language that is ultimately silenced by Cupid’s leaden arrow. Her once sovereign voice is now void of that sovereignty and authority. Here again, my initial claim was that the speaker brought this upon herself, when all along, Cupid was pulling the mythological strings. 

My initial reading of “When I Was Fair and Young” treated the speaker’s hubris as the poem’s main function that put Elizabeth in charge of her own isolation. That interpretation looked at the surface thematic elements but overlooked the Ovidian explanations of agency. A closer analysis of the poem’s literary craft – its refrains, anaphoric designs, and the irony of the ultimate loss of agency – shows the scaffolding I missed in my first attempts at research and analysis. It is Cupid’s golden arrow that gives the speaker such desirability, which fuels the hubris, and sets the tone for the leaden arrow. It is in Cupid’s counterstroke that produces the regret and isolation of the final stanza. What I believed to be Elizabeth’s agency, being absolute in her sovereignty and Divine Right, was always Cupid’s to grant and take away. It is interesting that Elizabeth signs this poem “Finis/Elizabetha Regina,” showing her to be the Sovereign one, yet she is never quite in control. I was amazed in the end to find the poem very paradoxical in that what was a gift in the beginning, becomes isolation in the end.

Works Cited

Bell, Ilona. Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Frye, Susan. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Elizabeth I, Queen of England, Leah S. Marcus, Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

May, Steven W. The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. 

MEARS, NATALIE. “Love-Making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c.1578–1582.” History, vol. 86, no. 284, 2001, pp. 442–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24425537. Accessed 30 Mar. 2026.