By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Below is our pick of some of the finest very short poems from the Renaissance. We’ve had to exclude several favourites, such as Tichborne’s Elegy and the anonymous song ‘Weep you no more sad fountaines’, since they are just a little too long for our self-imposed 14-line limit – but we had to draw the line somewhere, and the length of a traditional sonnet seems appropriate, given that that verse form flourished during the Renaissance.