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;