As you came from the Holy land
Of Walsingham
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
The Walsingham poem used to be attributed to Walter Raleigh, which must be an error. ‘True love’ had a different meaning in his gallantries, most famously when he pleasured a maid of honour against a tree. She began by pretending to resist, but within brief minutes ‘Nay, sweet Sir Walter’ turned into ‘swisser swasser, swisser swasser’. The carnal and the spiritual can co-exist: see Dr Donne. But in its structure of feeling, the Walsingham poem is a couple of generations earlier than Raleigh: either immediately pre-Reformation or at the very latest just before Henry VIII had unleashed the full malign rapacity of his robbers and iconoclasts.
After they despoiled the shrine at Walsing-ham — one of the great pilgrimage destinations when Christian Europe was united in faith — it became yet another ‘bare ruin’d choir where late the sweet birds sang’.
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