Richard Lovelace, Royalist, soldier, and poet, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries embodies the spirit of the Cavalier. Like his fellow poets Sir John Suckling and Thomas Carew, Lovelace was an accomplished amateur following in the tradition of Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtier (1528; translated, 1561), in which writing poetry, like proficiency in arms, love, and music, was one of the accomplishments expected of the gentleman. Lovelace’s work, consisting of two volumes of poetry published in 1649 and 1660, is certainly uneven, but it includes singularly beautiful and graceful lyrics that stand as exemplary for the casual grace and elegance of this group of poets.

Lovelace was born in 1618, probably in Woolwich, Kent. He was the eldest son of Sir William Lovelace and his wife Anne Barne Lovelace. Sir William, a member of an old and distinguished military and legal family and owner of a considerable amount of landed property in Kent, died in battle when Lovelace was only nine, leaving “his Lady ritch only in great store of children” (there were five sons and three daughters). At the age of 11 he was sent to the Charterhouse School in London, where, during the next five years, he would have known a future poet of quite different talents and inclinations, Richard Crashaw. Thereafter Lovelace enrolled as a student at the University of Oxford (in Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College). He was then, according to the 17th-century historian Anthony Wood, “accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him then, but especially after, when he retired to the great city, much admired and adored by the female sex.”

Lovelace was early associated with the brilliant and extravagant court of Charles I, which was a center not only of political interaction but also of artistic and literary patronage, a place that attracted and supported the painters Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, and Peter Lely, the musician Henry Lawes, and the poets Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller. At the age of 15 Lovelace became a “Gentleman Wayter Extraordinary” to the king; in 1636, at the age of 18, during a three-week celebration at Oxford, he was granted the degree of master of arts. Wood describes Lovelace as coming in 1638 in “great splendour” to the court; a year later, when the Princess Katherine died on her birthday, Lovelace contributed verse to a volume of commemorative elegies. Although Lovelace’s poetry shows a good many signs of his acquaintance with classical as well as contemporary poets, as a gentleman he took care to appear a connoisseur rather than a scholar, one who engaged in graceful allusion or response to the work of others, in a mode of social interaction rather than studious effort. Lovelace wrote to commemorate an occasion, to praise a friend or fellow poet, to give advice in grief or love, to define a relationship or the nature of honor, to articulate the precise amount of attention a man owes a woman, to celebrate beauty, and to persuade to love. That a good many of the poems of Lucasta (1649) were set to music by Lawes and others further indicates the social function of these lyrics, which elegantly and wittily articulate common themes.

Lovelace also tried his hand at drama: while a student at Oxford he wrote a comedy, titled “The Scholars,” which was acted first in his own college and later in London but was never printed; later in 1640, after some military experience of his own, Lovelace wrote a tragedy titled “The Soldier,” which was never performed. Neither of these plays survives, but their titles suggest a combination of conventional genre and personal experience. After leaving Oxford, Lovelace spent several months at Cambridge University, where he met another prominent poet of his generation, Andrew Marvell, with whom he remained on friendly terms.

Having met George, Lord Goring (later Earl of Norwich), at court, Lovelace became a member of the regiment of Goring’s son and served in the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640. This ill-advised attempt to impose the forms of worship of the Anglican church on Scotland not only failed but in fact marked the beginning of the decline of the power of Charles I. In this demoralizing campaign, in which Suckling also took part, Lovelace served first as senior ensign (1639) and then as captain (1640). Only one poem clearly grew out of this experience: the “Sonnet. To Generall Goring” is a poem of bacchanalian celebration rather than a glorification of military action.

When Lovelace returned home to Kent in 1640, having come of age, he took possession of his lands and assumed the usual duties of the country gentleman, including service as justice of the peace. But the civil turmoil that was to dominate England for the next generation and affect Lovelace until his death at the age of 39 soon intervened. In the struggle over religious doctrine and ritual, over church government, and over the amount of authority inherent in or ceded to the monarchy that led to the Civil War, Lovelace’s sympathies, by class and by temperament, were with the supporters not so much of Charles’s policies as of the monarchy itself. But Lovelace, although standing in the popular imagination as the ideal Cavalier, as soldier as well as poet and lover, actually spent comparatively little time in arms, a fact that derived from his early and decisive devotion to the Royalist cause rather than from any lack of enthusiasm: for Lovelace was prohibited first by imprisonment and later by parliamentary decree from participating in military action.

The kind of idealism expressed in perhaps his most famous poem, “To Lucasta. Going to the Warres,” is also revealed in Lovelace’s first recorded political action. In December 1640 a petition for the abolition of episcopal rule, signed with 15,000 names, was presented to the House of Commons. This movement, which was opposed by moderates such as Edward Hyde, later first Earl of Clarendon, and Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, led to a counterpetition, framed by Sir Edward Dering, in support of the rights of the king, governance of the church by bishops, and the reinstatement of the Anglican liturgy. There followed a chain of reactions—anger in Parliament and counterpetitions. When in Lovelace’s home county of Kent such an anti-Royalist, antiepiscopal petition was being drafted, Lovelace in 1641 led a group of men who seized the petition and tore it up. That dramatic action led to his being chosen in 1642 for a far more dangerous task—to present Dering’s pro-Royalist petition, which had been ordered burned, to the House of Commons on behalf of the county of Kent. In response to questioning by the Commons, Lovelace answered forthrightly, acknowledging the shredding of the anti-Royalist petition in Kent and asserting that he spoke for all the Kentish justices of the peace who had joined in rejecting it.

For his actions in Kent and for his candor in London, Lovelace was imprisoned in the Gatehouse in Westminster. After seven weeks Lovelace submitted a petition to the House of Commons, expressing submission and asking for clemency, but without any statement of regret for his past actions. In his petition Lovelace notes that in “beeinge confined here in the Springe-tide of Action, when open Rebellion treads on the late peacefull bosome of his Maiesties Kingdome of Ireland, [he] is to his farther Greefe disabled from discharging parte of that duetie, which he owes unto his Kinge and Countrie by his service there.”

Lovelace’s desire to serve the king in Ireland or elsewhere was hardly an inducement to the Commons to free him, but on June 21 he was released on bail, with the stipulation that he not go beyond the lines of communication without a pass from the speaker of the House of Commons. Thus Lovelace, a forthright young man of 24 who had already done his best to serve King Charles in the Bishops’ Wars, was effectively denied participation in the first phase of the Civil War.

But this first experience of imprisonment, so frustrating to Lovelace’s hopes and intentions, seems also to have given rise to one of his finest lyrics, “To Althea, From Prison,” in which he asserts an inner freedom of spirit in contrast to his physical confinement. In this poem Lovelace presents himself as a lover, visited by “divine Althea,” who comes “to whisper at the Grates,” as a member of a good fellowship whom he depicts in a grief-assuaging festivity, and most of all as the courtier whose confinement only makes him the more devoted to the cause for which he is punished:

When (like committed Linnets) I

With shriller throat shall sing

The sweetnes, Mercy, Majesty,

And glories of my KING[.]

In each of these instances there is a contradiction between the poet’s apparent situation—physical imprisonment—and what he declares to be the actual one—moral and spiritual freedom. Although imprisoned, either by love (“tangled in her haire / And fettered to her eye”) or by the walls of a prison, Lovelace asserts, at the end of each stanza, his essential freedom, concluding with his famous declaration of supremacy:

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,

Nor I’ron bars a Cage;

Mindes innocent and quiet take

That for an Hermitage[.]

This four-stanza lyric embodies much that is characteristic of Lovelace’s best poetry. It represents the voice of a single speaker who defines himself and his situation in a way that is both noble and paradoxical, that shows his independence of thought and action, his refusal to be overwhelmed or controlled by his circumstances. The general level of diction is simple, tending even to the colloquial and casual (“Fishes that tipple in the Deepe”) but spiced with a good deal of the sensuous and the concrete (“When I lye tangled in her haire / And fettered to her eye”) and with surprising word choices—”committed Linnets,” “shriller throat,” “no allaying Thames”—that keep Lovelace’s verse lively and interesting and raise it above the level of the mere gentleman amateur. In “To Althea, From Prison” Lovelace places clause against clause, line against line, yet interrupts that balanced structure with the surprising word so that the result is a sense of grace, elegance, and control that never ceases to seem spontaneous. The poem moves from its depiction of the three instances in which the poet, though imprisoned, is yet by his assertion free, to a ringing and climactic articulation of the general principle:

If I have freedome in my Love,

And in my soule am free;

Angels alone that sore above,

Injoy such Liberty.

Lovelace was free in body and in mind by late June 1642, but he was not allowed to join the king’s army in Ireland. Nevertheless he did what he could, selling most of his land in 1643 and using the proceeds, according to Wood, “to keep up the credit and reputation of the king’s cause by furnishing men with horse and arms.” Lovelace supplied his two brothers, Col. Francis Lovelace and Capt. William Lovelace, who did fight for the king, with men and money, and he supported his youngest brother, Dudley Posthumus Lovelace, during his study of tactics and fortifications in Holland.

Lovelace appears to have spent a good deal of time abroad from 1643 to 1646, in Holland and France. He may well have accompanied his former chief officer General Goring to Holland, where he met Princesss Louisa of Bohemia and wrote a complimentary poem to her on her drawing. Unable to join the struggle in Great Britain, Lovelace was among those who fought against the Spanish in Holland and was wounded at Dunkirk in October 1646.

It is to this period that “To Lucasta, Going beyond the Seas,” a song set by Lawes, has generally been assigned. This graceful lyric is the opening poem of Lovelace’s first published volume, where it appears in close proximity to several of his best-known and most successful poems. The identity of Lucasta is unknown: poets writing in the tradition of courtly love commonly addressed a (sometimes fictitious) lady whose name reflected the qualities ascribed to her: Lucasta, from lux casta, means “chaste light.” Although Wood confidently identified Lucasta with Lucy Sacheverel, “a gentlewoman of great beauty and fortune,” that claim has been doubted and was disputed by Lovelace’s modern editor C.H. Wilkinson, who associates “that bright Northern star” with the Lucas family. Whoever her original may have been, Lucasta, represented in Peter Lely’s engraving as a rather healthy-looking young woman with bared breast, is addressed in 27 of Lovelace’s poems.

“To Lucasta, Going beyond the Seas” is one of the poems by Lovelace with obvious similarities to work by John Donne, in this case “A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning” (1633), in which a lover urges his beloved not to mourn his absence, arguing that “They who one another keep alive, / Ne’er parted be.” But whereas Donne offers a series of extravagant yet precise analogies to the lovers’ situation, Lovelace’s poem, characteristically, is much less detailed, exact, and elaborate in working out a conceit. The conditional opening stanza looks as if it might set up a Donnean paradox:

If to be absent were to be

Away from thee;

Or that when I am gone,

You or I were alone;

Then my Lucasta might I crave

Pity from blustring winde, or swallowing wave.

But instead of proceeding to a dramatically executed triumph over fate and fact, Lovelace in stanza 2 simply declares his indifference to these forces and, in a milder, dilute evocation of Donne, asserts that the lovers inhabit a realm beyond the dictates of space and time:

Though Seas and Land betwixt us both,

Our Faith and Troth,

Like separated soules,

All time and space controules:

Above the highest sphere wee meet

Unseene, unknowne, and greet as Angels greet.

Lovelace’s poem takes for granted the reader’s acquaintance with Donne and, rather than an ingenious working-out of a conceit, offers a kind of graceful insouciance, a blithe assertion of independence in the face of unkind fate that has been seen by Cyril H. Hartmann as characteristic of the Cavaliers in general, an affirmation of the independence of mind from body, a refusal to identify freedom of the spirit with bodily freedom.

The mid 1640s—which drove Lovelace to Holland and led to such poems as “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres” and “To Althea, From Prison”—reveal him as soldier, poet, and courtier, as an attractive and magnetic personality, but also suggest his wider intellectual and aesthetic interests. Lovelace was a friend of the Dutch painter Lely, who succeeded Anthony Van Dyck at court and who designed the plates for Lovelace’s two volumes of poems, as well as of Endymion Porter, patron of poets and painters and artistic purchasing agent for Charles I. Both Lovelace and Lely were admitted to the Freedom of the Painters’ Company on October 26, 1647, and one of Lovelace’s poems offers discriminating praise of Lely’s portrait of Charles I and James, Duke of York, painted during the king’s imprisonment at Hampton Court. Lovelace was also on friendly terms with Thomas Stanley and George Sandys, poets and translators; with both the elder and younger Charles Cottons; and with Andrew Marvell and John Hall, both of whom, though closely connected with the parliamentary cause, wrote prefatory poems for the 1650 edition of Lucasta.

In the spring and summer of 1648, with Charles I forcibly detained on the Isle of Wight and the parliamentary forces dominant, sympathy for the king’s cause was manifested in a series of uprisings in Wales, Essex, Surrey, and Kent. Once again Lovelace appears to have taken a significant part, since once again his punishment was more severe than that of his companions. The rebellion in Kent was quelled by the army under Gen. Thomas Fairfax, and Lovelace was imprisoned in early June and held, despite a petition for his release, until April 1649.

When Lovelace emerged from prison, the cause he had fought for seemed irretrievably lost: the king had been executed in January 1649, the army under Oliver Cromwell was in the ascendancy, and Lovelace’s own economic circumstances were increasingly insecure. But the time of his imprisonment led, as in the case of the earlier “To Althea, From Prison,” to an assertion of spiritual freedom. Having used the enforced leisure to revise his verse, Lovelace published his first volume of poetry, Lucasta, in May 1649. Although, as Manfred Weidhorn points out, the act of publication itself may be a sign of Lovelace’s straitened circumstances, in a time when writing poetry was a gentlemanly thing to do but publishing it was not, and although Lovelace’s imprisonment may have delayed publication (the book had already been licensed for the press in February 1648), the appearance of his poems increased his contemporary reputation beyond the court circle and ensured the preservation of his work to the present day. Although 1649 was hardly the ideal year for a poet of Lovelace’s views to break into print (nor do sales appear to have been brisk), his poetry was welcomed by men who, like him, held the rank of colonel in the Royalist forces, and praised in a commendatory poem by Marvell as an example of an earlier, higher standard in the arts, likely to be censured by the present

... swarms

Of Insects which against you rise in arms.

Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions[.]

Of the final decade of Lovelace’s short life we know relatively little. His financial circumstances were certainly difficult, for he sold the remainder of the property he had inherited, including the family manor house at Bethersden, Kent, and the family portraits. But whether he lived the life of acute poverty described by Wood (“in ragged clothes, mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants”) has been much doubted. Though no longer the man who “when he was in his glory ... wore cloth of gold and silver,” Lovelace was not altogether friendless; he was supported to a significant degree by Edmund Wyld and by his old friend Charles Cotton, who is reported to have sent him twenty shillings every Monday morning. Like many others who had supported the king’s cause, Lovelace surely found it advisable to maintain a low profile. He died in London, most probably in 1657, and was buried near his kinsman Sir William Lovelace in the Church of Saint Bride’s in Fleet Street, which was destroyed in the Fire of London in 1666.

Lovelace appears to have contemplated a second volume of poems, which appeared only after his death. Lucasta: Posthume Poems, listed in the Stationers’ Register for 1659 but published in 1660, was seen through the press by his youngest brother Dudley Posthumus and by Elwood Revett, who appears to have acted as a literary agent for Lovelace. Although this second volume of poetry includes fewer brilliant lyrics than the first, it does expand our sense of Lovelace’s range. Besides occasional poems and love lyrics, many with a world-weary or sardonic twist, there are several quasi-emblematic poems about small creatures, translations, and some satires. There is plenty of evidence of the poet’s disillusionment with the topsy-turvy world in which he and fellow Royalists found themselves after the execution of Charles I and before the Restoration of Charles II, which Lovelace did not live to see.

As one of what Alexander Pope would later describe as the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” Lovelace had the ability to write graceful lyrics that look as if they had been tossed off without effort. But as Castiglione pointed out, such grace and apparent ease (sprezzatura) are the results of a good deal of practice. Often in Lovelace’s best lyrics only the effortless effect appears; but in a good many other deservedly less well known poems, the effort is obvious and the result sometimes contorted and confusing. As an accomplished amateur poet whose self-conception and self-presentation differ sharply from those of the professional writer of later days, Lovelace’s versatility is shown in the number of styles he employed. If his work often fails to achieve the level of what he imitates, he often achieves a particular grace or elegance, a flash of perspective not present in his models.

The two volumes of Lucasta comprise just over 100 original poems and several translations. The largest group consists of amatory poems, the majority addressed to Lucasta but also to Althea, Gratiana, Amarantha, and Ellinda, all of them courtly or Petrarchan idealizations of the power of the beloved. There are many occasional poems of compliment, elegies and poems of consolation (on the death of Princess Katherine, to his brother Francis on the death of their brother William, on the death of the sister of Charles Cotton the elder). Like Donne, Lovelace composed poems that idealize and elevate love as well as those that are cynical about it, that reject notions of constancy as irrelevant or fraudulent, that are dismissive or manipulative of women. There are satiric poems, such as “Against the Love of Great Ones,” that have been associated with the Roman satirist Juvenal but are more immediately related to the social attitudes of Jonson. There is a poem in the country-house tradition (“Being treated To Ellinda”) that recalls Robert Herrick, and a group of poems on small creatures (“The Grasse-hopper,” “The Ant,” “The Snayl”) with roots in the classical moral fable.

The Cavalier ideal for which Lovelace has often been taken as an exemplar is most clearly set out in “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres,” a poem that defines the two central activities of that ideal, love and war, and articulates wittily and forcefully the relationship between them. The tension is heightened by making war not simply a rival activity but “a new Mistresse,” whom the poet chases, thus making his decision to fly “the Nunnerie” of Lucasta’s “chaste breast, and quiet minde” look like what it is called in stanza 3—”Inconstancy”—with clear implications of both sexual and religious infidelity. Seemingly apostate, the poet “with a stronger Faith imbrace[s] / A Sword, a Horse, a Shield,” until, in the ringing final stanza, the deserted lady herself is made a devotee of the speaker’s new faith.

This brief lyric, which serves both as self-defense and self-definition, is a kind of litmus test for the Cavalier attitudes idealized by earlier generations of critics, such as Mark Van Doren, who found in the two lovers a commonality of interests rather than a tension. While the poem compliments Lucasta, that chaste light, so pure as to be designated a kind of sanctuary, the poet’s position is both active and definitive, while hers is static and passive. He not only leaves her but places her, with the parenthetical designations “(Sweet)” and “(Deare),” defining first her new religion and then defining, not the terms on which she would find him worthy of love (as, for example, a courtly lover who failed to do his duty would not be highly regarded by a lady) but the terms on which he will love her:

Yet this Inconstancy is such,

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Deare) so much,

Lov’d I not Honour more.

Both the stance—the Cavalier who leaves a woman not through infidelity but as an instance of faith to, as it has long been known, “a higher cause”—and the rhetorical means by which it is accomplished are characteristic of Lovelace. His poem is supremely graceful, deft, and masterful; but its persuasion depends not only on the kinds of manipulation of logical categories that we would find in Donne but on the finessing of oppositions, so that what has appeared to be inconstancy is redefined as the highest form of faith. The lady is both sweet and dear, but Lovelace asserts that he must yield, not with regret but with adoration, to the new mistress, which turns out not to be merely “Warre and Armes” but “Honour,” a realm in which war and love are inseparably linked.

Lovelace plays the equally conventional role of the courtly lover in “Lucasta’s World,” in which the power of the lady creates a world that is frozen or incinerated by her glance. Such exaggerated effects are the sort of Petrarchism mocked by Donne in the opening of “The Canonization,” but Lovelace, though he does not transform the convention, nevertheless creates some striking lines in his description of a world that is both natural and yet supremely artificial, whose artifice is its chief attraction:

Cold as the breath of winds that blow

To silver shot descending snow

LUCASTA sight [sighed]; when she did close

The World in frosty chaines!

And then a frowne to Rubies frose

The blood boyl’d in our veines[.]

Lovelace attributes similarly cosmic powers to his poetic mistresses in two even more successful poems, “Gratiana dauncing and singing” and “To Amarantha, That she would dishevell her haire,” both of which go beyond the conventions of Petrarchism to a quite fascinating baroque instability of images. There is in Gratiana’s “constant Motion / Even, and glorious, as the Sunne” a trace of what would be a Metaphysical conceit if it were more fully or precisely elaborated. Gratiana, rather like Lucasta, shapes a larger order imagined by the poet, but whereas Lucasta expresses her power by burning and freezing, Gratiana simply dances. Yet that action becomes the cosmic dance itself and transforms her surroundings to the very heavens:

She beat the happy Pavement

By such a Starre made Firmament,

Which now no more the Roofe envies;

But swells up high with Atlas ev’n,

Bearing the brighter, nobler Heav’n,

And in her, all the Dieties.

Rather than extending and elaborating this conceit, as he does in “Lucasta’s World” or as Donne does in “The Sun Rising,” Lovelace quickly shifts perspective, bringing his reader back to the realm of the love poem, in which the dance is not only the cosmic pattern but also a kind of morris of “a Lovers thought.” Like the Petrarchan mistress, Gratiana is a paradox of beauty and power, sweetness and refusal: it is not until the breathtaking climax of the poem that we see how much destruction she has wrought: “As when she ceas’d, we sighing saw / The floore lay pav’d with broken hearts.” The poem concludes with a compliment that makes explicit the meaning of Gratiana’s name as it reestablishes her within the realm of the classical pantheon and the music of the spheres:

So did she move; so did she sing

Like the Harmonious spheres that bring

Unto their Rounds their musick’s ayd;

Which she performed such a way,

As all th’ inamour’d world will say

The Graces daunced, and Apollo play’d.

The beloved at the center of the universe, as the arbiter, the mistress as a paradoxical being, combining “sweet command and gentle awe”—these ideas and tropes, central to Petrarchism, are hardly new with Lovelace. But the rendering of them is supremely graceful (except for the false step of “Gratiana steeres that Noble Frame” of line 3, in which the idea of a woman dancing collides rather awkwardly with the notion of cosmic movement). Lovelace’s treatment yields moments of illumination, such as “The floore lay pav’d with broken hearts,” which suddenly casts the metaphor in a new light, conveying the human dimension of pain as well as the image of a starry sky and an inlaid Renaissance pavement. The poem moves from graceful articulation of a conventional compliment to a quite remarkable sense of unstable perspective that is properly termed baroque.

Lovelace also makes striking use of paradoxical images in the “Song” set by Lawes, “To Amarantha, That she would dishevell her haire,” which goes beyond precise or even admiring observation to a kind of baroque splendor, even to decadence. The argument that there is a special “Delight in Disorder,” a particular beauty in the absence of rigid perfection, is seen in both Herrick and Jonson, but Lovelace goes further than either poet, beyond Herrick’s sensuous enjoyment of “a wilde civility” to a sensual delight in which the lady’s liberty becomes the poet’s license:

Amarantha sweet and faire,

Ah brade no more that shining haire!

As my curious hand or eye,

Hovering round thee let it flye.

Lovelace’s complicated syntax, which sometimes leads to confusion, here seems purposeful, for, in the act of urging Amarantha to allow her hair to fly freely, he also gives an image of his controlling gaze, which “As my curious hand or eye” is also “Hovering round” her. In each case what appears a simile for the woman’s freedom in fact becomes an image of enclosure by a male observer or actor: “As my curious hand or eye”; “As it’s calme Ravisher, the winde.” The oxymoronic images of sexual violence and possession coupled with references to peace seen here are continued in the description of Amarantha’s hair, “neatly tangled,” “excellently ravelled.” The association of the woman with the sun, and the assumption that her hair must be blond, both conventional, are then combined in the brilliantly imaginative conclusion:

Doe not then winde up that light

In Ribands, and o’re-cloud in Night;

Like the Sun in’s early ray,

But shake your head and scatter day.

As in “Lucasta’s World,” the sensuous realm created by Amarantha’s hair becomes a kind of imaginary refuge for lovers, a place of sexual fulfillment:

Within this Grove,

The Bower, and the walkes of Love,

Weary lye we downe and rest,

And fanne each others panting breast.

There are even more explicit sexual suggestions in the stanza that follows:

Heere wee’l strippe and coole our fire

In Creame below, in milke-baths higher:

And when all Well’s are drawne dry,

I’le drink a teare out of thine eye.

But the stanza is remarkable, not so much for the decadence of its imagery as for its resemblance to the kind of sensuous excess found in Crashaw’s poem on Mary Magdalene called “The Weeper.” “To Amarantha” lacks the tight structure of “To Althea, From Prison” or “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres”; it is instead a series of brilliant and rather unstable images, images that associate Lovelace not only with the Cavalier poetry of compliment but also with the powerfully shifting perspectives of the baroque.

That kind of taste for the sensuously excessive is evident in several other poems. In “A loose Saraband” (1649), Lovelace recounts how Cupid, “The little Tyrant Theefe,” stole his heart, subjecting it to all kinds of torments, treating it as a ball, a top, a pin cushion, until it is washed with Lucasta’s tears and healed with the balm of her kisses. In the rather decadent “La Bella Bona Roba” Lovelace extends a cool gaze toward the body of, as the title tells us, a harlot, whom he considers as if she were nothing but flesh, and whose chief interest consists in the varying substance and texture of skin and flesh:

Such whose white-sattin upper coat of skin,

Cut upon Velvet rich Incarnadin,

Ha’s yet a Body (and of Flesh) within.

There are certainly poems in Lovelace’s repertory that seem the result of a too-curious consideration: in “A Black patch on Lucasta’s Face” Lovelace wittily, almost Metaphysically, reinterprets the patch which appears first as a blemish, resulting from the presumption of “a Court Fly,” as the “large Monument” of “th’industrious Bee,” which “Mistook her glorious Face for Paradise.” This poem, like “Ellinda’s Glove,” is closer to the Metaphysical mode in creating a more unified approach to the subject, which it explores in great detail, finding significance in every aspect of it. In “A Black patch,” the bee, which may be presumed to have stung Lucasta, enacts an elaborate fantasy: though a mere spark, he tries to emulate the sun (indeed the double suns of her eyes) and “Acts the Romantick Phoenix fate”: “chaft” and “set on fire” by the beauty of her eyes, he “in these holy flames doth glad expire.”

The plot is less complicated but the examination similarly thorough in “Ellinda’s Glove,” in which, in the absence of his mistress, the poet pays tribute instead to the glove, which he calls “Thou snowy Farme with thy five Tenements.” His action looks like an image of self-abasement, but the poem concludes with the suggestion of a much more direct and possessive sexual relationship. The lover who would scarcely be allowed to kiss the lady, or even her hand, at last proceeds to imply something more substantial, as he addresses the glove:

Then give me leave to leave my Rent with thee;

Five kisses, one unto a place:

For though the Lute’s too high for me;

Yet Servants knowing Minikin nor Base,

Are still allow’d to fiddle with the Case.

That shifting to the physical implications, to the ground bass of what has been until this point in the poem a Petrarchan compliment, wrought to the highest pitch, is evident also in “Her Muffe,” in which after strained conceits exploring the significance of the lady’s hands being incased in fur, Lovelace moves from the highly wrought and passionate yet clearly limited adulation of Petrarchism to the more explicitly sexual desires of the would-be lover:

But I, in my Invention tough,

Rate not this outward bliss enough,

But still contemplate must the hidden Muffe.

Lovelace, then, is sometimes the Cavalier in the most idealized sense—the courtly lover, the embodiment of honor, in love and in war—but there are also poems in which he approximates the more dangerous character Samuel Richardson named after him in Clarissa (1747–1748), a man of superb and gallant manners, but importunate and finally menacing. And there are poems in which the witty formulas of the “Cavalier spirit” are engaged in the service of sexual domination, as for example in “The faire Begger,” which elaborates a popular baroque paradox, that of the beautiful and desirable woman who must beg (“Commanding Asker”). The speaker, after turning striking phrases on the subject of her inadequately clothed beauty, offers to satisfy her hunger if she satisfies his, moving from an initial emphasis on feeding his “Fancy” to a more usual suggestion:

Thou shalt be cloath’d above all prise,

If thou wilt promise me imbrac’t;

Wee’l ransack neither Chest or Shelfe,

I’ll cover thee with mine owne selfe.

Lovelace also wrote poems in which he analyzes in detail the life or activities of small creatures—“The Ant,” “The Grasse-hopper,” “The Snayl,” “The Falcon,” “The Toad and Spyder”—but as one would expect of a poet of his era, these poems are neither “nature study” nor romantic celebrations of the natural world but are rather a moralizing, nearly an allegorizing of the subject and have their root in a rich tradition of such beast fables, from Aesop and the Greek Anthology to Jean La Fontaine and emblem literature, in which such creatures are seen as exemplifying the qualities of human life and experience.

In the best known of these poems, “The Grasse-hopper,” Lovelace addresses his friend Charles Cotton the elder. Based on a lyric by the Greek poet Anacreon in which the grasshopper sings with delight in the summer, a virtual owner of all that it sees, Lovelace’s poem depicts the grasshopper as the type of carefree pleasure, a creature lacking foresight and, unlike the provident and industrious ant, making no preparation for the winter, a point that leads to Lovelace’s striking apostrophe:

Poore verdant foole! and now green Ice! thy Joys

Large and as lasting as thy Peirch of Grasse,

Bid us lay in ‘gainst Winter, Raine, and poize

Their flouds, with an o’reflowing glasse.

The opening five stanzas emphasize first the fullness of the grasshopper’s joys, “Drunke ev’ry night with a Delicious teare,” and then their fragility and transiency, seen in relation to the cycle of the seasons:

But ah the Sickle! Golden Eares are Cropt;

Ceres and Bacchus bid good night;

Sharpe frosty fingers all your Flowr’s have topt,

And what sithes spar’d, Winds shave off quite.

After the apostrophizing of Cotton in the sixth stanza—”Thou best of Men and Friends”—the poem goes on to create an image of a warmth and fellowship which is both indoors and internal, as well as more lasting than the external summer which is past:

we will create

A Genuine Summer in each others breast;

And spite of this cold Time and frosen Fate

Thaw us a warme seate to our rest.

As in “To Althea, From Prison,” Lovelace movingly depicts the notion that internal peace and warmth, like internal freedom, are truer and more lasting than anything dependent on external forces. The poem concludes with a similar emphasis on the independence of spirit that constitutes true liberty:

Thus richer than untempted Kings are we,

That asking nothing, nothing need:

Though Lord of all what Seas imbrace; yet he

That wants himselfe, is poore indeed.

Like its Anacreontic source, this poem emphasizes the consolation to be found in wine and good fellowship. But it also treats the situation of Cavaliers left out in the cold by the ascendancy of the parliamentary forces and the execution of King Charles I. The image of the grasshopper, Don Cameron Allen has argued, far from being a type of folly or imprudence, is associated in classical sources with nobility, with warmth, abundance, and light, with music and the Muses. If, as he suggests, it is also a representation of the poet, of a king in exile, of men in political disfavor, the reader may see in the concluding stanzas images of the king who though deposed is about to be reinstated, an amalgam of King Charles and the King of Christmas, both banished by the parliamentary powers, set in the context of the Roman Saturnalia and preserved in an inner kingdom of hope and good fellowship:

Dropping December shall come weeping in,

Bewayle th’usurping of his Raigne;

But when in show’rs of old Greeke we beginne,

Shall crie, he hath his Crowne againe!

There are complementary political messages in several other small animal poems, poems that give poignant indications of the situation of a Cavalier in the Interregnum. “The Ant,” in contrast to the grasshopper a type of prudence and foresight, has clear similarities to Puritans who work even on festival days: he “drive[s] on sacred Festivals, [his] Plow.” Although the poet seems to praise the ant’s virtues (“thou great good Husband”), he presents him as out of tune with the rhythm and harmony of the seasons, as in effect committing an act of sacrilege in persisting in labor on a holiday (a day made holy by Lucasta), like the Puritans who forbade indulgence in holiday sports. The ant in its incessant labor becomes an image of meaningless activity, of a miserable life, finally subject only to predators: “Thus we unthrifty thrive within Earths Tomb / For some more rav’nous and ambitious Jaw.” In contrast to the short-lived but saturnalian grasshopper, the ant, though always working, never lives.

In two poems on the snail (“The Snayl” and “Another”) Lovelace depicts the qualities of prudence and self-containment, of discretion and diplomacy needed in the Interregnum: “Sage Snayl, within thine own self curl’d; / Instruct me softly to make hast.” Like the Royalist, or even like the future King Charles II in exile, the snail is a mysterious creature—cautious, self-protective, associated with gold, silver, and the rising sun. Lovelace concludes “Another” with words that make explicit the theme of human and political exile:

But banisht, I admire his fate

Since neither Ostracisme of State,

Nor a perpetual exile,

Can force this Virtue change his Soyl;

For wheresoever he doth go,

He wanders with his Country too.

In Lucasta: Posthume Poems Lovelace goes beyond the assertions of spiritual or psychic independence of the first volume to a rather darker mood, such as that expressed in “A Mock-Song,” which ironically represents the topsy-turvy world of postmonarchical England:

Now Whitehalls in the grave,

And our Head is our slave.

The bright pearl in his close shell of Oyster;

......................................

And the Body is all but a Belly:

Let the Commons go on,

The Town is our own,

We’l rule alone;

.................

For our Dragon hath vanquish’d the St. George.

Not only has the king been executed at his palace at Whitehall, but order, as Lovelace conceives it, is overthrown, and any virtues (such as “the bright pearl”) must be concealed. In these later poems, Lovelace’s earlier assertions of freedom within confinement are replaced by visions of confinement with more serious consequences, such as “A Fly caught in a Cobweb”; images of fatal attraction, as in “A Fly about a Glass of Burnt Claret”; or images of mortal conflict, as in “The Toad and Spyder” or “The Falcon,” which dies impaled on the beak of a heron. That these poems have political implications is clear, but their message is necessarily muted. While this second volume includes fewer of the brilliant and graceful poems most often associated with Lovelace, it does include a group of by no means negligible meditations that reflects the somber conditions of his life and enlarges his poetic range. The greater predominance in this volume of rhymed couplets over more-varied stanza forms also links it with the general tendencies of later-17th-century verse.

In his own time Lovelace, who was best known as the poet of “To Althea, From Prison,” clearly had some reputation as writer of lyrics, as soldier and courtier, but he was less well known for his poetry than were his contemporaries Suckling and Carew. His work was largely forgotten from the later 17th century to the later 18th century, when several accounts of his life and selected poems were republished in anthologies. In 1817 and 1818 S. W. Singer published an edition of both volumes of Lucasta, but with all passages considered obscene or improper excised and with the addition of other poems no longer thought to be Lovelace’s. The first full edition of Lovelace’s poems since his death was published in 1864 by William Carew Hazlitt. Although Lovelace has benefited from the renewed interest in 17th-century poetry that arose early in the 20th century, he has more often been treated as an example of a type than as a writer of great individual interest, and, other than Weidhorn’s book published in 1970, there are no recent full-length studies.

Lovelace wrote a few nearly perfect lyrics, which are the deservedly famous staple of anthologies. But both the range of his work and the number of fine poems are greater than might be judged by those few examples. Sometimes his verse is heavily indebted, most obviously to Donne but also to Jonson and others. Lovelace’s verse is also often remarkably complex, not always, as in the case of Donne or Jonson, owing to its density and complexity of style but because he simply has not bothered to untangle his syntax and make his meaning clear. But, despite his unevenness, Lovelace also wrote remarkably well in a variety of genres: as courtly lover; cynical amorist; poet of occasion, compliment, and consolation; animal fabulist; and satirist. Some of his most interesting work tends rather to the baroque than the Metaphysical, to the cynical and skeptical rather than the romantic. Because neither the voice nor the stance of the Cavalier is much akin to our own time, Lovelace has received relatively little attention in recent years. Yet his place is assured, not as one of the greatest voices in a century so rich in epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry, but as a poet finely representative of the virtues and limitations of Cavalier and Caroline verse, one who wrote lines that, to borrow the words of his great contemporary John Milton, later generations would “not willingly let ... die.”

The Grasshopper

The Scrutinie

The Snail

Song to Amarantha, that she would Dishevel her Hair

To Althea, from Prison

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars