To his Pandora-written by Alexander Craig. Alexander Craig of Rosecraig was better known by his contemporaries as Scoto-Britane, which was his pen name. He was born in 1567, in Perthshire, in the north of Scotland, the year same year Mary Queen of Scots was executed after her long imprisonment in England by her cousin Elizabeth I. Born into an aristocratic family in post reformation Scotland, Alexander Craig lived through an age of civil war and religious conflict, yet his works still manage to capture the beauty of his time through his poetry. He is best remembered for his now for love sonnets.

 

 

To his Pandora from England by Alexander Craig

ow, while amid those dainty downs and dales
With shepherd swains I sit, unknown to me,
We sweetly sing and tell pastoral tales,
But my discourse and song’s theme is of thee.
For otherways, alas, how can it be?
Let Venus leave her blest abode above
To tempt my love, yet thou, sweet soul, shalt see

That I thy man and thou shalt die my love.
No tract of time nor sad eclipse of place
Nor absence long, which sometime were due cures
To my disease, shall make thy slave to cease
From serving thee till life or breath endures;
And till we meet, my rustic mates and I
Through woods and plains Pandora’s praise shall cry.