Author:Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

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Edward de Vere
An Elizabethan courtier and poet
Edward de Vere


  • The Poems of Edward de Vere (1921, J. Thomas Looney, ed.) (External scan)

Individual poems[edit]

Numbered according to May.[1]

1. Labour and its Reward ("The labouring man that tills the fertile soil")

2. Care and Disappointment ("Even as the wax doth melt")

3. The Forsaken Man ("A crown of bays shall that man wear")

4. Loss of Good Name ("Fram'd in the front of forlorn hope")

5. Not Attaining to his Desire he complaineth ("I am not as I seem to be")

6. Reason and Affection ("If care or skill could conquer vain desire")

7. Love and Wit ("My meaning is to work what wonders love hath wrought")

8. The Lively Lark

9. Love and Antagonism ("The trickling tears that fall along my cheeks")

10. Revenge of Wrong ("Fain would I sing, but fury makes me fret")

11. Come Hither Shepherd Swain (some versions begin "When wert thou born, Desire?")

12. Winged with Desire

13. Love compared to a tennis-play ("Whenas the heart at tennis plays")

14. What Cunning can Express

15. Love thy Choice ("Who taught thee first to sigh")

16. Were I a King


I. Anne Vavasour's Echo ("Sitting alone upon my thought")

II. My Mind to me a Kingdom is

III. Woman's Changeableness ("If women could be fair")

IV. I do increase their wand'ring wits



  1. Steven W. May, "The poems of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex" in Studies in Philology, 77 (Winter 1980), Chapel Hill, pp.1-132.