Prais’d be Diana’s Fair and Harmless Light

By Sir Walter Ralegh 1552–1618 Sir Walter Ralegh

Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light;

Prais’d be the dews wherewith she moists the ground;

Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night;

Prais’d be her power by which all powers abound.

Prais’d be her nymphs with whom she decks the woods,

Prais’d be her knights in whom true honour lives;

Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods;

Let that Diana shine which all these gives.

In heaven queen she is among the spheres;

In aye she mistress-like makes all things pure;

Eternity in her oft change she bears;

She beauty is; by her the fair endure.

Time wears her not: she doth his chariot guide;

Mortality below her orb is plac’d;

By her the virtue of the stars down slide;

In her is virtue’s perfect image cast.

A knowledge pure it is her worth to know:

With Circes let them dwell that think not so.

Biography

Before his execution for treason, Sir Walter Ralegh won fame as an explorer of the New World — both for voyages to Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina (whose capital is named after him), and to Venezuela in search of El Dorado, the mythical city of gold. Also a scholar and a gifted lyric poet, Ralegh brought glory to Elizabethan England along with the potatoes and tobacco he is said to have introduced there.

Continue reading this biography