Katherine Philips – Interesting Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

One of the most interesting female poets of the seventeenth century, Katherine Philips (1632-64) wrote this short poem as an elegy for her son, ‘H. P.’, who died just six weeks after he was born. The joyous exultation with which the birth had been greeted – ‘A son, a son is born at last’ – turns to tragedy with the boy’s death, in this heart-wrenching and accessible elegy by an underrated seventeenth-century female poet.

Epitaph

On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred

What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain,
What one moment calls again.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship’ is one of the best-known poems written by the mid-seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips (1631/2-1664). Philips lived through the English Civil War (and wrote a poem about the execution of King Charles I), and was married at the age of 16 to a man some 38 (yes, thirty-eight) years her senior. ‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship’ is addressed to Anne Owen, one of Philips’ closest female friends.

To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship

I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.

This carcass breathed, and walked, and slept,
So that the world believed
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they were all deceived.

For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine;

‘Epitaph’: A Poem by Katherine Philips

A Short Analysis of Katherine Philips’ ‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship’