A Fig for Fortune

"A Fig for Fortune" is a 1596 long allegorical poem by the English Catholic writer Anthony Copley written as a parodying response to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It intended to reject both Protestant portrayals of English Catholics as inherently disloyal to Queen Elizabeth, as well as hard-line Jesuit calls for Catholics to become martyrs by resisting the Protestant Queen.

Text
Unlike The Faerie Queene, which is written in Spenserian stanzas, A Fig for Fortune is written in the Venus and Adonis stanza: iambic pentameter rhyming ABABCC.

"Vested in sable vale, exild from Joy, I rang'd to seeke out a propitious place Where I might sit and descant of annoy And of faire fortune, altered to disgrace, At last, even in the confines of the night I did discerne aloofe a sparkling light."