A Lover's Complaint

The poem begins with a description of a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings, and other tokens of love.

She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again: O, that infected moisture of his eye, O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed, O, that forc'd thunder from his heart did fly, O, that sad breath his spungy lungs bestowed, O, all that borrowed motion seeming owed, Would yet again betray the fore-betray'd, And new pervert a reconciled maid!

This idea was not widely accepted, and attributions based on general aesthetic impressions of a poem have since become less common among literary scholars.

Late sixteenth-century readers developed a taste for them and would not have been surprised to find complaints at the end of sonnet collections.

Jackson adds: Had Vickers keyed in "spongy", "outwardly", and "physic"—trying the various possible original spellings and selecting instances of "physic" as a verb—he would have found that in the whole of LION ["literature online" database], covering more than six centuries of English poetry, drama, and prose, four separate works contain all three words: Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and "A Lover's Complaint".Harold Love, in his The Times Literary Supplement review, has similar questions regarding Vickers' suggestion: Vickers was led to Davies by the number of words from the "Complaint" he found during a computer search of the invaluable LION archive; but any such investigation is bound to favour such a voluminous author against the less prolific or minimally preserved.

The reasons were that, like Davies, he wrote a vast amount of verse and that his style had a chameleonlike quality that brought it close to the poetic mean of the time.