Did noted 17th century poet Katherine Philips make a grammatical error?
Does the last line of the first stanza of Katherine Philips's poem, To Mrs. M. A. at parting have a grammatical error?
It's surprising that a renowned poet and translator at that time would use the wrong pronoun to fit the rhyme. Or am I mistaken here?
I HAVE examin'd and do find,
Of all that favour me,
There's none I grieve to leave behind
But only, only thee.
To part with thee I needs must die,
Could parting sep'rate thee and I.
Would the poet's contemporaries have seen the construction as ungrammatical or non-standard (though acceptable in a poem) or was it more generally acceptable then than it is now?
If you think the subjective first-person singular pronoun "I" was only used in the last line due to "poetic license," please post that as an answer and provide evidence that the structure was considered ungrammatical outside of poetic contexts at the time the poem was written.
Solution 1:
At the time Philips wrote the poem, around the middle of the 17th century, the use of 'I' as the object of a verb or preposition was (sometimes) considered grammatical. As noted in the entry under I, pron. and n.2, A.II.2a, OED Online,
This has been common at various times (esp. towards the end of the 16th and in the 17th cent., and from the mid 20th cent. onwards); it has been considered ungrammatical since the 18th cent.
["I, pron. and n.2". OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/90671 (accessed September 28, 2016).]
As defined in A.II.2a, the pronoun 'I' is
Used for the objective case after a verb or preposition when separated from the governing word by other words (esp. in coordinate constructions with another pronoun and and).
(op. cit.)
Among the attestations are three from Shakespeare in the early 1600s (Merchant of Venice, Sonnets and As You Like It), as well as this from The Nicholas Papers in 1649:
Two attestations from The provok'd wife (1697) make the case for uses in the latter half of the 1600s:
(The provok'd wife, J. Vanbrugh)
(op. cit.)
