Just one stanza for you in this post, but what a stanza. I have been reading poetry written in the reign of Henry VII and the first decades of the reign of Henry VIII. This is the period of literature filled with what C S Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century called ‘bad poets’. Lewis’s verdict is damning: “This is the real midwinter of our poetry; all smudge, blur, and scribble without a firm line or a clear colour anywhere.”