Awkward and egregious, Ralegh's poem sits oddly within the canon, a troubling anomaly that confounds certainties, refuses to conform to type or expectation, and stubbornly fails to answer the questions that it raises. Apart from the authorship of the single holograph manuscript – the one thing that is not in doubt – there is virtually nothing else about the poem that commands universal assent. What is this poem, heavy with marginal and interlinear markings that is yet written in Ralegh's ‘best’ hand: a rough draft or presentation copy, a discarded fragment or an ostentatious case of the mannerist non-finito? Are its notorious syntactical obscurities the sign of work in progress, dashed off in the heat of the moment, or the products of a masterly ambiguity designed with every intention of making it look that way? The title – ‘The 21th and laste booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’ – obscures more than it clarifies: for, although the water/moon motif was long a part of Sir Walter's personalized iconography with Elizabeth, it is, as many critics complain, neither developed nor stabilized within the poem and, with its abrupt transitions from subject to object, positive to negative, is characterized only (if not inappropriately) by its fickleness and fluid mutability.