- ME thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
- Within the Temple, where the vestall flame
- Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,
- To see that buried dust of living fame,
- Whose tombe faire love and fairer vertue kept;
- All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
- At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;
- And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,
- For they this Queene attended: in whose steed
- Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse:
- Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
- And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse,
- Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,
- And curst th' accesse of that celestiall theife.
This sonnet, "A Vision Upon this Concept of the Faery Queene," was written by Sir Walter Raleigh and published as a commendatory verse at the beginning of Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queen (1590). Raleigh and Spenser met in Ireland, and Spenser modeled after Raleigh his character Timias, a squire who woos the "heavenly born" Belphoebe, modeled after Queen Elizabeth. Some spelling has been modernized.