The Phoenix Nest is dedicated, as it were, to the memory of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, and opens with three elegies upon Astrophel (i.e. Sir Philip Sidney).
Three of them are from his Phillis (1593), a volume of eclogues, sonnets, elegies and other lyrical pieces; the rest appeared first in The Phoenix Nest, though one, "Like desart woods", is published in Englands Helicon, where it is given either to Dyer, or to "Ignoto."
It is worth noticing that Lodge, in one song, "The fatall starre that at my birthday shined," makes use of a metre which might be scanned as, and is clearly modelled upon, alcaics, but is, in practice, composed of iambic feet.
The Earl of Oxford has a charming lyric, "What cunning can expresse," and it is possible that the longest poem in the volume, A most rare and excellent dreame, is the work of Greene.
"Sweete Violets (Loves paradice) that spred" is a good example of the long stanza of complicated structure and involved rime-sequence which the poets of the day used with rare skill, and which led the way in time to the formal ode.