1. Anthony à Wood claimed that Lucasta (‘chaste light’) was a ‘gentlewoman of great beauty and fortune named Lucy Sachaverel’. According to Wilkinson, she was a member of the Lucas family – hence the name ‘Lucasta’.

2. A delicious pun is intended: he runs from her arms to embrace the arms of battle.

1. The background of this famous poem, which appears in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, is described by Percy: ‘This excellent sonnet, which possessed a high degree of fame among the old Cavaliers, was written by Colonel Richard Lovelace during his confinement in the Gate-house, Westminster: to which he was committed by the House of Commons, in April 1642, for presenting a petition from the county of Kent, requesting them to restore the king to his rights, and to settle the government. See Wood’s Athenae, vol. ii. p. 228, and Lysons’s Environs of London, vol i. p. 109, where may be seen at large the affecting story of this elegant writer, who, after having been distinguished for every gallant and polite accomplishment, the pattern of his own sex, and the darling of the ladies, died in the lowest wretchedness, obscurity, and want, in 1658.’

2. The MS originally had ‘Birds’.

3. to sport amorously.

1. Browne came across the melody, an anonymous seventeenth-century Allmayne, in Elizabeth Rogers’s Virginal Book, while performing in a production of Milton’s Comus at Cambridge University.