SOURCE: Guy-Bray, Stephen. “‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’: The Earl of Surrey and the Duke of Richmond.” English Studies in Canada 21, no. 2 (June 1995): 138-50.

In the following essay, Guy-Bray contends that “So crewel prison” is not just an elegy, as it is often classified, but also a love poem.

“So crewell prison” is a useful poem for historians of English poetry: Surrey, always (and now perhaps primarily) associated with technical innovation, is said in this poem and in some others to be beginning the tradition of the English elegy. But this is not the only possible generic description. The classification of “So crewell prison” as an elegy has, practically speaking, ruled out the possibility that the poem could fit into other kinds of poetry, and criticism has tended to concentrate on the poem's connections to the elegy to the exclusion of other poetic and generic considerations. I want...