"A Rapture" is more than a witty dream poem from which the speak draws poetic inspiration. The poem's opening image of honor as a masque is balanced by the poem's closure with the same type of images and its worldly power, showing a playful and sophisticated awareness of the resolution of the ideal fantasy or daydream, juxtaposed by the real external truths.

Thomas Carew's `A Rapture' was in its day an extremely shocking poem, considering the era in which it was written such erotic topics were unmentionable. The poem uses the traditional pastoral images permeated with a deeper animation. It acknowledges the conflict between eroticism and Christianity and obviously a conflict is bound to happen. Creating a puzzling and distressing effect; deserving of praise.

"The relationship between art and social life in the earlier seventeenth century is particularly fascinating to a study of Carew's poetry, which has so...