Sir John Suckling (1609–1641), dilettante, inventor of cribbage, belonged to the company of Cavalier poets attached to the court of the English king, Charles I, and his queen, Henrietta Maria. Like his literary confrères Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace and Thomas Carew, Suckling counted himself among the “Tribe of Ben,” intimates and disciples of the older poet and dramatist Ben Jonson. The tribal aesthetic turned on wit, as well as on a throwaway gaiety that we might understand as a species of despair, a tacit conviction that beyond the immediate pleasure you grasp as it slips through your fingers, nothing really matters.  
 
See, for example, today’s Poem of the Day, “Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover?” Its five-line stanzas in common or hymn meter, with an ababb, rhyme scheme, assert the pointlessness of sighing after a girl who, as we in the twenty-first century might put it, just isn’t that into you. Rest assured, fond lover, this isn’t a you problem. It’s not as though she had any intrinsic value, that you should keep chasing her. The only girl worth loving is the one who loves you. If this girl gives you no joy, says the poem’s speaker, then the hell with her.