"In an important survey of Elizabeth's poetry Steven W. May argues that the Queen wrote more than has been previously recognised, and he expands her corpus to as many as fifteen originals verse in English, French, and Latin, including addresses and responses to her courtiers, an elegy, and a poem that was later printed as a ballad. But Elizabeth's poems challenge editorial efforts to establish textual authenticity or even in some cases clear attribution. Because they circulated largely in manuscript and survive within multiple sources, the poems are subject to considerable textual ambiguity; and thus, like most coterie poetry of the period, they resist efforts of modern editors who seek to establish authenticity on the basis of a single, original text. Moreover, Elizabeth's poetry was often copied and preserved in collections of speeches and court records or in county archives, documents that are easily overlooked as specimens of literary culture." [1]
The Inner Temple Library is fortunate to have an example of Elizabeth I's poetry contained within a manuscript from the Petyt collection.
"The poem is written in ten and a half long lines [...] In the left-hand margin opposite the first two lines is the ascription: per Reginam, Walter Rawley".
In 1968 L. G. Black wrote an article about this poem for the Times Literary Supplement, in which he claims:
"The poem has until now been regarded as lost, but I have been fortunate enough to find a copy of it, crossed out but still legible, in a manuscript of the Petyt Collection at the Inner Temple Library. It occurs among a group of poems on the first of three leaves of MS Petyt 538 volume 10 - a volume made up largely of copies of letters, speeches and petitions, some of which were originally composed between 1578 and 1588." [2]
[1] Summit, J. '"The Arte of a Ladies Penne": Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship'. English Literary Renaissance, Autumn 1996, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 395-422
[2] Black, L. G. 'A Lost Poem by Queen Elizabeth I'. The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3456, 23 May 1968, p. 517