THE poems of Ralegh were * first collected and authenticated8
by Archdeacon Hannah, in 1845, and by the same editor re-
printed with additional pieces (including the then newly dis-
covered MS of the fragment Cynthia) In 1870. Earlier
collections, uncritical and haphazard, contained much that we
now know to be by other hands. Ralegh's apparent indifference
to the fate of his poems, coupled with the textual liberties
habitually taken by Elizabethan anthologists (in whose volumes
most of them first saw the light), has left us with insoluble
problems of text and authorship. It is broadly true to say that
each poem has as many versions as sources; and therefore,
except in fare instances where one source has clear priority
over others,, a present-day editor is free—or rather, is forced—
to take his choice among variant readings. This Everyman
text, while based broadly on Hannah, is the result of such
choice. AE the poems have been re-punctuated. Readers
who want a catalogue of the numerous variant readings, or who
care to examine the pros and cons of this ascription or that, are
referred to Agnes M. C. Latham's Poems of Sir Walter Ra/egb
(Constable, 1929). The present volume contains all finished
(and some unfinished) poems known to have been written by
Ralegh, and, with one exception, the best of those others that
are plausibly but less confidently attributed to him. The
exception is the famous ballad: *As ye came from the holy land.
It is one of the most beautiful of all English poerns; but in some
form or another it certainly existed before Ralegh arrived on
the scene; Ralegh's connexion with it is largely a matter of
conjecture; and.it Is too well known to need reprinting here
for its own sake®