(2.217–20)

Drayton often invents compound adjectives to describe aspects of the landscape, people and animals. These provide some of the most lucid and accessible uses of language in the poem. Here, for instance, he simply uses ‘sea’ and ‘worn’ to give a transparent rendering of the shore’s appearance: it is worn by the sea. This is also the case with ‘corn-strewed’; ‘curl-faced’ and ‘fair-enamoured’, which describes the condition of being charmed by beauty (14.104, 14.20, 28.388). These constructions stand out from the majority of Drayton’s neologisms, which tend to be quite eccentric in the way they play with the existing meanings of words.