Close Reading, Interpretive Claim, and Thesis/Early Draft/Peer-Reviewed
When I Was Fair and Young
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more.
How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe,
How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show,
But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore:
Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.
Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy,
Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy,
I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more:
Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.
As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast
That neither night nor day I could take any rest.
Wherefore I did repent that I had said before:
Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.
This poem by Elizabeth I does not have a firm date for when it was written. Scholars put the date in the window of c. 1580s, which would put Elizabeth I’s life in the time of her potential marriage to François, Duke of Anjou (also known as Duke of Alençon). He visited her and there was a marriage contract written in 1579. The marriage never happened due to political conflicts and Elizabeth I did not receive the blessing of her courtiers, as she had expected.
I used the “Surface to Depth” method to form my close reading, interpretive claim, and potential thesis. In reading about Elizabeth’s life and how she was in constant fear of losing the Crown, her words read like a woman who is trying to find her agency through prose. At first glance, she seems to be asking rhetorical questions about how she was so sought after, yet she spurned them all. “But I did scorn them all,” reflects a woman who is using her objective beauty to control the world around her. She reflects on her hubris by saying, “But I the prouder grew.” She seems to lose some of her agency when Cupid shows up and she wants to “repent” of her earlier verses, finding that, in her own agency, she has become a prison to her own desires.
While her desire is to show control, it is her words that doom her to a loneliness that repentance can not remove.
Close Reading:
Surface – Elizabeth remembers being “fair and young,” pursued by many (“Of many was I sought”). As her pride grows, “Venus’ son,” Cupid, comes in to remove her hubris and cause her to “repent,” but the poem reflects that because “neither night nor day I could take any rest,” her repentance comes too late.
Depth – There is really no plot in the poem, but there is repetition. Her words, “Go, go, go” is decisive, but Cupid comes in and shuts her down and turns her own words around by saying “you shall say no more.”
Interpretive Claim:
In finding her agency, Elizabeth I finds her loneliness will last a lifetime.
Thesis:
That Elizabeth asserts her claim to the Throne, not only by Divine Right, but as a person unto herself, she wills herself into a corner of perpetual loneliness and trying to control the uncontrollable.
Cited Sources:
Elizabeth I: Collected Works
Meats, Natalie, “Love-Making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c. 1578-1572.” History, vol. 86, no. 284, 2001, pp. 442-66, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24425537. Accessed 3 February 2026.
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