TO CROWN A BEAUTY  (2006)

 

It is hard to take for a guide a name

of a girl you never met, very certainly

a pretty girl, fresh as a rose, vainly

expecting from life a future tame...

 

Elizabeth is her name, like  a queen,

perhaps the most queenly dame of all:

before her throne fell so many a thrall,

not of her might, but for having seen

 

the beauty a queen would flaunt, and yet

so many have not; though Queen Bess,

called the Virgin Queen, for never marrying,

 

had lovers galore, the most illustrious set

England could provide and they confess

would die if only for her kindliness' sharing...

 

[A girl named Elizabeth asked me to write a sonnet with her name.  Of course I wrote a praise to Queen Elizabeth the First...]