rest. 15 Wherefore I did repent that I had said before: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. Editor's Comments Sometimes people are nervous about reading a poem because they're afraid they don't know enough about the poet, or about the history of the time when the poem was read. Even if you feel that way the best thing to do is still to make a start by reading the poem. But the question of how to use what we know of the world around the poem is an important one. Elizabeth is a wonderful case in point. She was one of England's greatest monarchs, reigning for decades during a crucial time in the development of the English state. Most people who do know anything about her know about her as a ruler, but not so many people know that she also wrote poems. So how can we read this little poem about lovers being held at arm's length? We could just try to decode it, like detectives looking for clues into Elizabeth's private life. Or we could pretend we don't know who wrote it and read the poem as if it appeared by magic one day on someone's printing press. Well, I doubt if we could forget that Elizabeth was the author, and as for the other choice, we would be naive if we thought that poems record a person's life in any simple or straightforward way. But while the record of a poem may