In Raleigh's "Farewell to the Court", everything leaves except the one thing the speaker wants gone. Joys expire, days cannot be recalled, love goes astray, and only grief remains, as the refrain says: "Of all which pass'd the sorrow only stays." The title tells us the speaker is leaving the court, and Raleigh was a courtier in Elizabeth I's England. The poem itself, though, names no event, no rival and no cause. We get "love misled" and a life "in fortune's hand", and nothing more specific. That vagueness gives the poem its force. It reads less like a story than like a mood, and it ends in a quiet wish for death.
The structure is tight. Three quatrains and a closing couplet make fourteen lines, the frame of an English sonnet, but the rhyme scheme is far more rigidly bound. Every quatrain rhymes ABAB, and the B rhyme is always the same sound: "days" and "stays" in the first stanza, "ways" and "stays" in the second, "delays" and "stays" in the third. The poem keeps circling back to one syllable it cannot get away from. The B words also move in a telling order. "Days" is time, "ways" is the path ahead, and "delays" is death itself, held off too long. The refrain returns almost unchanged each time, like a bell tolling. In the last stanza the word order loosens slightly ("only the sorrow stays"), as if even the repetition is wearing thin.
Rhythm helps. The lines run in steady, unhurried iambic pentameter, and the vocabulary is mostly short, plain words. The third stanza opens with an eleven-syllable line, "As in a country strange, without companion", whose extra unstressed ending makes the line trail off in a way that suits the loneliness it describes. The "companion/done" rhyme is also only approximate, so the sound itself seems slightly unsettled.
The imagery turns on movement, fortune and the seasons. A "dandled" day is one bounced on a knee like a petted child, so the past is pictured as a time when fortune indulged the speaker. Now his "lost delights" are "clean from sight of land", which suggests a ship sailing out of view and leaving him on "unknown ways" and in "a country strange". Fortune's hand, which once cradled him, is the same hand that now holds his life.
The third stanza brings in the cycle of the year: "sweet spring spent, whose summer well-nigh done." The speaker is not yet old. Winter is still ahead, and the closing couplet shows that dread is part of his motive. "Care forewarns" him to leave "ere age and winter cold". His impatience shows in his language: he complains of "the wrong of death's delays", as though death were a late visitor. Then comes "haste me hence", a command to himself.
The couplet is also where the form breaks. After three stanzas ending on the same line, we expect the refrain a fourth time and do not get it. Instead the poem stops lamenting and starts moving, and its final word, "fold", picks up the earlier image of fortune's hand. A fold is a sheepfold, a place of shelter, but in this context it also suggests a grave. Fortune first held him and now gives him an enclosure, and the poem leaves open whether that is comfort or ending. I would argue it is both.
The poem matters for how much it does with so little. It has no elaborate argument, only a single rhyme sound, a returning line and a few well-chosen images. Together they make loss feel like a trap, with grief stuck in place while everything else slips away. The speaker's wish to "haste" toward the end is unsettling because the poem sounds so calm. Its restraint carries the bitterness, and it never needs to explain the wound for us to feel it.