Status Updates From The Selected Poems

I'd just been thinking how many phrases in these poems would make good book titles, when all of a sudden up in my feed pops someone's review of "Monarchy of Fear"...

(from Greville's "LIX")

But when this life is from the body fled,
To see itself in that eternal glass
Where time doth end, and thoughts accuse the dead,
Where all to come is one with all that was;
Then living men ask how he left his breath,
That while he lived never thought of death.

This long tranche of poems remains love-obsessed, more often addressed to Cupid himself than to his lover - though some broader cynicism about the world enters in. It also remains messy, confusing, and visceral. "Cupid doth head his shafts in women's faces". "Then cut I self-love's wings to lend him feathers / Gave him mine eyes to see in Myra's glory", etc.

The early Caelica poems are indeed very conventional love poems. They're made interestingly odd by Greville's sometimes strange diction and syntax, a distinctive awkwardness of rhythm (lot of feminine rhymes). The 'note on the text' explains that it's left Greville's obsession with commas intact specifically to preserve this awkwardness.