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The Sovereign’s Snare: Poetic Agency and Isolation in Elizabeth I’s “When I Was Fair and Young”

Queen Elizabeth I’s poem, “When I Was Fair and Young,” was likely composed between 1585-1588, rather early on in her reign. In the poem she presents a speaking voice that is both sovereign and perilous. Upon first reading the poem, it seems to tell the story of a woman lamenting her quick dismissal of suitors, only to be struck by Cupid, and left unrepentant and restless. To read this poem at the surface level, as only a lyrical love poem, is to miss the deeper issues of Divine Right and a woman’s personal agency in a dynastic patriarchal system. Many scholars, such as Ilona Bell, Carole Levin, Steven May, and Leah S. Marcus have written well concerning the fact that Elizabeth used much of her writing as political positioning. This essay argues that in “When I Was Fair and Young,” Elizabeth intentionally wrote in the first-person voice to assert her agency in both a personal and political way. She showed this by having control over the marriage question, specifically the Anjou marriage negotiations, and her own Body Politic. Unfortunately, in writing her lyrical poems, including “On Monsieur’s Departure,” she wills herself into a finite world of loneliness. In the end, the agency that asked rhetorical questions with lyrical precision and projected strength to her subjects, gave way to her ultimate isolation. In her sovereignty as queen, her pen became the ultimate in self-imprisonment.  

This poem is really a lyrical self-portrait, which must be read in the context of its historical and political context. Natalie Mears establishes that the Anjou marriage negotiations (c. 1578-1572) were one of the most perilous crises of Elizabeth’s reign, putting the queen at the center of the competing pressures of Parliament, her Privy Council, and the questions over having a female monarch and succession (442-444). During the 1580s, Elizabeth’s marital status was not only a personal one, a matter she could keep private, but also a matter of governmental intrusion. The poem’s speaker – a woman who is refusing suitors with the dismissive and hubris refrain, “Go, go go, seek some other where, importune me no more,” is not simply a woman dictating her own agency, but also managing a public crisis towards the question of marriage and succession. As Barrett-Graves writes, “Elizabeth kept her opponents off guard while preserving as much of her own agency as possible (45).

The poem’s structure gives a drama of a woman’s agency that is interwoven with governmental overtones, which over four stanzas begin with a declaration of strength that leads into unrepentant loss. In the beginning of the opening two stanzas, the speaker is quick to use her agency to dismiss unspecified suitors who are courting her for their gain. As Bell has noted, for “Elizabeth…poetry was the preferred medium for exploring complex thoughts and feelings that could not be expressed straightforwardly or openly (145). The speaker’s power is all her own: she controls the words, the suitor’s movements, and how he may speak to her. By writing this way, Elizabeth upsets the constraints of the patriarchal hierarchy around her that puts females as passive and asserts herself as the active agent in the scene. Elizabeth was familiar with the Petrarchan framework of poetry and sets it on its head as she is not the silent beloved, but she is sovereign in her agency as she speaks, commands, and dismisses.

King, in his work concerning the Virgin Queen puts definition to the poem’s rejection of suitors. King writes that Elizabeth “was able to convert her unprecedented weakness as a celibate queen into a powerful propagandistic [manipulating] claim that she sacrificed personal interests in the name of public service (2). In “When I Was Fair and Young,” the speaker is scornful of her many admirers – “How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe” – shows a powerful example of Petrarchan conceit in which the speaker is the unattainable beloved. The speaker’s hubris, readily admitting “But I the prouder grew,” can be read as both a personal position of agency and a political ideology. The writer is saying in my Body Politic I cannot marry because I am already married to England. She is stating privately what she means publicly. King’s writing also reveals that the Petrarchan framework in which the poem is written, “England’s perpetual virgin queen, Elizabeth could escape the political compromises necessitated by the marriage of her kindred monarchs” (58). The poem’s first two stanzas show her agency, that becomes, in the end, an unintentional trap.

The third stanza takes a decisive turn when “fair Venus’ son” – Cupid – enters the writer’s lyrical world and uses her own refrain against her. When Cupid declares, “I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more,” is an attack on the very sovereignty that has been used to dismiss suitors and is now being stripped away. In Bell’s own words, “Elizabeth was the period’s most prominent writer (7). As such, the loss of voice signaled by Cupid amounts to Elizabeth’s own loss of agency that leads to isolation. The writer extends her authority when she “scorns them all,” but is now commanded by Cupid to “say no more.” Cupid, widely known for his capricious ways, does not punish the speaker with an unwanted marriage, he punishes her with desire – “such change grew in my breast/That neither night nor day I could take any rest.” This was a longing, that although she repented of her hubris, she could never act upon. The final stanza of this poem, in which the earlier dismissals end in the restlessness that Cupid has inflicted, shows the agency of a woman who cannot undo her situation, nor can she act on the eventual consequence of her actions.

As the writer seeks repentance for her actions, she shows the difficulty of her situation. The final refrain, “Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more” is not spoken from a place of hubris, but of capitulation. The original sovereignty is gone, merely repeated out of compulsion. Her prose has become a loop that ends with Elizabeth’s sovereignty intact, but her agency is now constrained. Elizabeth, through her many writings and especially her lyrical prose, has sought to control her privacy as a woman, and her sovereignty as Divine Right. She is unable to concede the isolation she has perpetrated on herself, for to do that would impugn the poetic and political voice she commands. 

“When I Was Fair and Young” is best understood not as a lyrical poem of desire and regret, but a commanding prose on the cost of a woman’s agency against her patriarchal boundaries. Elizabeth uses the Petrarchan tradition by upending it – where the Petrarchan damsel is mute – here it is the pursuer who has lost his voice. As Levin, Bell, Summit, and others have written, Elizabeth’s poetry was never meant to be merely lyrical or private. Her poetry must be framed within the context of the history it inhabits. The poem’s speaker, full of pride and confidence, falls into a state of unresolved desire and repentance. This poem mirrors the queen’s own situation at the time – she asserts her own sovereign agency against those who would compel her to marriage but finds herself in a restless place that repentance can never remove. The five-beat refrain of this lyrical poem opens wide the personal cost of agency held against the patriarchal tide of submission.

Works Cited

Bell, I. (2010). Elizabeth I : the voice of a monarch / Ilona Bell (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Elizabeth I, Q. of E., Marcus, L. S., Mueller, J. M., & Rose, M. B. (2000). Elizabeth I : collected works / edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. University of Chicago Press.

Herman, P. C. (2002). Reading monarch’s writing : the poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I / edited by Peter C. Herman. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

King, John N. “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1, 1990, pp. 30–74. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2861792. Accessed 10 Mar. 2026.

Melita Thomas. “The Reign and Life of Queen Elizabeth I: Politics, Culture, and Society. By Carole Levin.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.