On the Horrid Murder of that
Incomparable Prince1

Edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall

This poem follows one Upon the Imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty, That Unparalleled Prince, King Charles the First13; it thus follows not only in the manuscript’s arrangement, but in chronology. Charles, jailed in 1647, was in 1649 beheaded by his opponents in England’s civil wars. The monstrous singularity of this event seems reflected in the volume’s preceding blank page, paired with another after the next poem, On the Same15: these two poems, in their efforts to grieve a beloved, murdered ruler, huddle together between visible, almost legible stretches of silence. Here, the speaker draws on the authority of conventional poetic claims of ineffability associated with praising monarchs. But now it is not just words that fail; now, even tears and sighs won’t serve — a devastating claim for a poet who figures much of her verse as tears and sighs. Instead, this poem insists the only fitting response to the king’s dismemberment is a kind of self-vivisection by mourners who are exhorted to weep not tears, but eyeballs, and to sigh not air, but their very souls: that is, to grieve themselves to death.

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Let none presume to weep; tears are too weak
Such2
 an unparall’d3
 loss as this to speak.
Poor village girls do so express their grief,
And in that sad expression find relief.
When such a prince4
 in such a manner dies,
Let us (ay me!) no more drop tears, but eyes;
Nor let none dare to sigh or strike their breast
To show a grief that so transcends the rest.
Plebeians5
 so each vulgar loss deplore6
;
We do too little, if we do no more.
When such a king in such a manner dies,
Let us suspire7
 our souls, weep out our eyes.