Richard Lovelace (1618–1657) belonged to the company of courtier-poets with whom the English king, Charles I, an ardent patron of the arts, surrounded himself in the numbered days of his flourishing. “Cavaliers,” the court’s Parliamentarian opponents called these courtiers — and they did not mean it as a compliment. The word derives from the French chevalier (a mounted knight), but in the context of the power struggle that culminated in the English Civil War, cavalier became a term of puritan mockery, intimating that the Stuart monarch had gathered to himself an effete pack of fops and wastrels. For his pro-Royalist sympathies and activities, Lovelace served two stints in prison in the 1640s. He died in poverty at thirty-nine, his star extinguished. But in the golden haze of the early 1630s, according to his Oxford contemporary Anthony Wood, he had been “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; a person also of innate modesty, virtue, and courtly deportment . . . much admired and adored by the female sex.”  

And his poetry? If the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets meant to examine the paradoxes of the Christian soul, then it fell to their secular counterparts to take up the paradoxes of the all-too-human heart: its aspirations toward (and failures of) integrity, and particularly its approach/avoidance tango with sexual love. We might think of this poetry as a last early modern gasp of the medieval courtly-love tradition, in which the chevalier confesses to his own shortcomings and grapples ruefully with the categories of love that compete for his allegiance. “I could not love thee, dear, so much / Lov’d I not Honour more,” Lovelace wrote, for example, in his famous “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.”  In today’s poem, with its common meter cadences and its ababb rhymes, a lover — possibly a person of modesty, virtue, and courtly deportment, clearly much admired and adored by the female sex — walks his last night’s one and only through a knotty apologia for sampling all the flavors before settling on a favorite.  

Song 
by Richard Lovelace 

Why should you swear I am forsworn, 
        Since thine I vowed to be? 
    Lady, it is already morn, 
        And ‘twas last night I swore to thee 
        That fond impossibility. 
 
    Have I not loved thee much and long, 
        A tedious twelve hours’ space? 
    I must all other beauties wrong, 
        And rob thee of a new embrace, 
        Could I still dote upon thy face. 
 
    Not but all joy in thy brown hair 
        By others may be found; 
    But I must search the black and fair, 
        Like skilful mineralists that sound 
        For treasure in unploughed-up ground. 
 
    Then, if when I have loved my round, 
        Thou prov’st the pleasant she; 
    With spoils of meaner beauties crowned 
        I laden will return to thee, 
        Even sated with variety. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.