[In the following essay, Anselment critiques the traditional assessment of Suckling as merely a cynical love poet.]

Among the group of poets conveniently labeled “Cavalier,” John Suckling has in particular been stereotyped. Largely because of the set anthology pieces and the limited critical studies, “Natural, easy Suckling” is commonly seen as an unabashed rakehell and a dilettante writer whose amateur love poetry is synonymous with libertine cynicism.¹ This characterization, like the more inclusive designation “Cavalier,” neatly places Suckling's poetry in a literary and a philosophical tradition; but the depiction is misleading. While some of his more famous poems apparently endorse a cynical vision of love, the entire canon reveals this is only one response in a complex and even sensitive search for the wisdom in love forbidden to the “fond lover.”

The short lyric “Out Upon It,” often cited as a typical Suckling poem, epitomizes both the traditional manner and the essential crux of his love poetry. Unlike John Donne's intensely personal immediacy, the dramatic opening stanzas establish a public, somewhat detached mode. The speaker, highly conscious of more traditional poetic attitudes, casually affects a deliberate pose:

Out upon it! I have lov'd
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.
Time shall moult away his wings,
Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world again
Such a constant lover.(2)

Rather than ignore the extraneous world for a universe newly discovered in the eyes of a beloved, this poem plays to its audience. The avowedly confessional declaration with its obviously inflated diction reverses conventional expectations, and the self-dramatizing speaker displaces the lady as the object of praise. The disparity between his boasting assertion and the reality that this millennial love will perhaps last three more days if all goes well is, of course, egregiously ironic. The conscious posture, dismissing a sacrosanct tenet of Renaissance love poetry, is calculated to be amusingly outrageous; but the concluding stanzas complicate this effect. Turning momentarily to the ostensible object of his love, the speaker admits with apparent reluctance,

But the spite on 't is, no praise
Is due at all to me:
Love with me had made no stays,
Had it any been but she.
Had it any been but she,
And that very face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

(ll. 9-16)

The persona's hyperbolic claim in the closing lines, although conceding the lady's great beauty, in fact questions the speaker's sincerity and seriousness. With sophisticated aplomb he lightly adds still another variation to the Petrarchan preoccupation with the constant lover, yet the levity also contains a qualified seriousness. Suckling's ironic rendition tacitly implies that the art of loving, whether Petrarchan or Cavalier, depends to some extent upon role-playing and exaggeration. While the Petrarchan lover ultimately realizes self-fulfillment through a ritualistic subjugation, in this version the male ego remains intact while it compliments the woman. The praise differs in kind, but the extremeness and improbability are consonant with the more traditional poetic expressions. The ironic perspective, however, is radically different.

Irony, as Aristotle recognizes in his discussion of the eiron, is a mode of decorous behavior;³ it is for Suckling also a sign of sophisticated complexity. The speaker's urbane insouciance embodies the natural easiness or the “conversation of a gentleman” admired by the Restoration, and it seems to imitate Quintilian's strictures on “elegant facetiousness” or to anticipate Shaftesbury's on “the Freedom of Wit & Humour”;⁴ in any case this ethos is an integral part of Suckling's poetic vision. The poet can be wittily amusing without becoming overly serious or tediously involved, and he establishes with his audience a form of mutual compliment and admiration. “Upon My Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden,” for example, assumes an intimate and well-defined world of peers; and the bantering exchanges and unforced raillery between Carew and Suckling are designed to amuse an audience familiar with the real natures of both the participants and the object of the ironic compliment.⁵ This rapport insures the success of the coterie joke, but here and in most of Suckling's poems it is posturing that creates a detachment necessary for the success of the poem.

While the poems effortlessly sustain a desirable colloquial ease and naturalness, they often consciously affect a sense of noninvolvement. Thus the first of the three poems grouped as sonnets carefully establishes an initial indifference:

Dost see how unregarded now
That piece of beauty passes?
There was a time when I did vow
To that alone;
But mark the fate of faces;
The red and white works now no more on me,
Than if it could not charm, or I not see.

(ll. 1-7)

Ordinarily the tradition of the sonnet would demand a passionate declaration of unrequited love or an emotional denunciation of love; the speaker in this sonnet, it seems, strikes a calculated pose for the benefit of his auditor. Cool and unperplexed, the speaker musingly considers why the lady's beauty no longer attracts him; but the question is only briefly entertained. His air of studied flippancy suggests that greater concern might make him a bore; besides, he has taken the occasion to reaffirm “She every day her man does kill, / And I as often die,” and the nonchalance further enhances his sophisticated image. To create an impression on his audience Suckling may, as the next sonnet in the group clearly reveals, change casual indifference to deliberate iconoclasm. In his address to Cupid conventional expectations are reversed, and instead of asking for a beautiful woman he pleads,

Make me but mad enough, give me good store
Of love for her I court:
I ask no more,
'Tis love in love that makes the sport.

(ll. 5-8)

The strikingly paradoxical “love in love” unromantically reduces love to a madness that animates a series of conventional gestures; the game and not the love is valued. Although the subsequent stanza offers a justification premised upon the fickleness of fancy, the poet is interested less in the argument and more in its impact on the audience. To insure its vividness Suckling concludes,

'Tis not the meat, but 'tis the appetite
Makes eating a delight,
And if I like one dish
More than another, that a pheasant is;
What in our watches, that in us is found;
So to the height and nick
We up be wound,
No matter by what hand or trick.

(ll. 17-24)

The debasingly antiromantic description of appetite and the explicitly phallic connotations of the final metaphor assault the reader's sensibilities; and the poem's ultimate success depends upon an exhibitionistic wit similar to “If, When Don Cupid's Dart.”⁶ Here too Suckling's final stanza, which culminates in a familiar dilemma found also in Donne's “The Triple Fool,” asserts that if love's pains must discomfort both the afflicted and all who must listen to his woe,

Then thus think I:
Love is the fart
Of every heart;
It pains a man when 'tis kept close,
And others doth offend when 'tis let loose.

(ll. 14-18)

Even more outrageous than the terminal metaphor of the previous poem, this controlling image is nevertheless wittily appropriate. In both instances the humorously epigrammatic aptness opposes any offensiveness, and the audience reaction becomes even more important than the vision of love. The speaker, who assumes various degrees of emotional detachment, is the central focus in these and a number of other poems, and his carefully affected poses are the key to Suckling's poetry.

Because the expression of a cynical libertinism is particularly congenial to the poseur, Suckling could have been drawn as a matter of course to this fashionable point of view. Donne, who provides the inspiration for several of his poems, had already demonstrated its poetic potential, and the libertine philosophy was currently influential on the continent. For the modish court of Henrietta Maria with its continental ties, libertinage combined a mode of manners with a philosophical respectability to appeal quite naturally to a sophisticated class. Outside of the mainstream of both established morality and traditional views of love, libertine cynicism provided the court poet with an opportunity to be wittily original and emotionally composed. But Suckling's characteristic use of the persona at least questions the conclusion that he whole-heartedly endorsed this position. Tone more reliably establishes the nature and extent of Suckling's cynicism.

Although any tonal reading assumes that the sheer number of poems espousing cynicism is not as important as the attitudes developed within the poems, this fact is easily overlooked in critical analyses. Even the standard study, Fletcher Orpin Henderson's “Traditions of Précieux and Libertin in Suckling's Poetry,” too readily concludes that Suckling's “attitude toward the relations between the sexes is entirely physical.” Indeed the first poem he cites, appropriately the natural, easy song Millamant admires in The Way of the World, provides the basis for the assumption:

In a “Song” he stated his view, using a figure which was a favorite of his: “Some youth that has not made his story, / Will think, perchance the pain's the glory / And mannerly sit out love's feast: / I shall be carving of the best, / Rudely call for the last course 'fore the rest.” Here love is reduced to its lowest common denominator. Woman is no more than a good dinner. Frequently he expresses this idea in one way or another.⁷

A catalogue of other poems indicates that Suckling does explore this idea in his poetry,⁸ but it is dangerous to conclude that the poet uncritically accepts the position expressed in the stanza and, for that matter, that it is “his attitude.” The speaker in the poem, the first stanzas establish, is an older man—or if he is not physically aged, his self-characterization as an old hawk defines a man of experience who through “long custom” has become “sullen and wise.” This worldly figure, who lacks the flippancy or lightness commonly found in Suckling's personae, also no longer has any interest in either the manners or sport of love. As his candid, almost weary disclosure reveals, love has become for him a crude physical appetite. Satiety rudely demands “the last course 'fore the rest,” but the speaker presents more than an unsentimental assessment of love. Although the knowledge gained through experience has shaped his ill-mannered conduct, in the last stanza the speaker also admits a poignant dissatisfaction:

And, oh, when once that course is past,
How short a time the feast doth last!
Men rise away, and scarce say grace,
Or civilly once thank the face
That did invite, but seek another place.

(ll. 16-20)

True to his unwavering perspective, he accepts the inevitable nature of his fate; yet the sense of resignation cannot conceal the pathos and disillusionment in the final lines. Paradoxically the emotional containment accentuates the tension, and it would be difficult to neatly categorize this poem as either cynical or libertine.

The tonal ambiguity also occurs in more obviously cynical poems such as “There Never Yet Was Woman Made”; its cause, while more clearly discernible, is quite similar. Again the speaker has considerable experience in the ways of love and he willingly shares his knowledge:

There never yet was woman made,
Nor shall, but to be curs'd;
And oh, that I, fond I, should first,
Of any lover,
This truth at my own charge to other fools discover!

(ll. 1-5)

The arresting assertion and the theatrical self-designation as a “fond” lover are rhetorically motivated, and they challenge the audience of “other fools” to ignore a knowledgeable person who views life without illusions. Women, the speaker seems to argue, deserve to be cursed because the feminine heart is fickle and indiscriminate. Yet the poem is neither bitter nor misogynous, for the dramatic tone of the opening shifts from the matter-of-fact pronouncement to betray a sensitive concern. If women are by nature promiscuous, the poem concludes there is always a gallant who eagerly “loads his thigh”:

For still the flowers ready stand:
One buzzes round about,
One lights, and tastes, gets in, gets out;
All all ways use them,
Till all their sweets are gone, and all again refuse them.

(ll. 21-25)

The final emphasis in the repeated use of “all” unexpectedly gives new dimension to the opening declaration that women are only made “but to be curs'd.” Within the sexually charged metaphor, the gallant who “all ways” uses all women does so variously and “always.” Women are then inevitably destined or cursed to a postlapsarian existence; and their lot, captured in the final image of the faded and neglected flower, evokes compassionate sympathy. This tender, quiet melancholy at first may seem out of place in a poem notable for its numerous sexual puns and suppressed allusions, but the apparent incongruity, like the tonal tension in the previous poem, stems from the poet's comprehensive perspective. The awareness that women make men fools is imparted to “You that have promis'd to yourselves / Propriety in love”; hence the lover who is conscious of his social image will curse women in both of the poem's senses just as the sensualist must offend the hostess of “love's feast” to glut his own appetite. The male ego will remain intact, and the social image will be reaffirmed, but this selfishness has its price. In short, Suckling is too sensitive to ignore the dilemma.

Yet his concern with public image and poetic originality necessarily precludes the more traditional or “honest” lover; indeed in a song that parodies this conventional lover, “Honest Lover Whosoever,” it leads to the conflation of honesty and fondness. The poem describes a series of extreme attitudes, and after each the refrain tauntingly reminds the would-be lover that any lapse proves “Thou lov'st amiss; / And to love true, / Thou must begin again, and love anew.” The list of witty impossibilities demanding that the honest lover must always “quake” and be “struck dumb” in his lady's presence, unfailingly find great wit in her most trivial utterance, and totally ignore all else chides the most commonplace romantic beliefs; in their place the satire tacitly insists upon a social decorum that renders the behavior of the honest lover ridiculous.

The demand for an impossible constancy is a rhetorical poly implicitly recognized in the use of parody, and like the dismissal of the “honest lover's ghost” in “Sonnet III,” witty ingenuity is the primary concern; however the preoccupation with absoluteness has more serious implications. The honest lover Suckling describes was, of course, quite dated in the court of Charles I; despite some currency in the précieux poetry, its Petrarchan conventions were already dead, and both the prevailing poetics and the hypersensitivity about sophisticated, decorous behavior discouraged excessive emotionalism. More important, many seventeenth-century poets could no longer unquestioningly accept the belief that love was either a unifying force or a metaphysical reality.⁹ Although the change involves a number of complicated cross currents, Suckling's poetry often posits one explanation. The basis for his reassessment is a form of skeptical realism, or as Donne had earlier written, “Love's not so pure and abstract as they use / To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse.”¹⁰ Experience, the touchstone in Suckling's poetry, suggests that love has no quintessential nature; it is, as the imagery of painting, fiction, and dreaming reminds the reader, often illusory. In reality, Suckling's poems suggest, lovers are not passively overwhelmed by love; they actively determine the existence of love through their own fancy and appetite. While the power and validity of love are not automatically denied, this psychological viewpoint introduces a disconcerting relativity; pushed far enough it could easily lead to solipsism.¹¹ Concomitantly, the experience of love must also be reevaluated, for “Pure love,” Suckling notes, “alone no hurt would do; / But love is love and magic too.”

In the absence of “pure love,” the honest lover is an impossible ideal. As “Loving and Beloved” asserts,

There never yet was honest man
That ever drove the trade of love;
It is impossible, nor can
Integrity our ends promove;
For kings and lovers are alike in this,
That their chief art in reign dissembling is.

(ll. 1-6)

The poem's fundamental opposition between “good nature” and “passion” recalls the Renaissance debates involving reason and passion, but the moral issue is significantly altered. No longer concerned about the threat passion poses to both the reason and the will, the speaker is fully resolved that passion must be willfully controlled if the game of love is to be successfully played. In this poem, “weary” of the state he is in and reluctant to make the necessary compromise, he chooses to retain his honesty by withdrawing, “Since (if the very best should now befall) / Love's triumph must be Honour's funeral.”

Only the “wise” lover who is willing to compromise can successfully play the game of love, but even then his solution involves another eitheror. In several poems the speaker bluntly argues “T' have lov'd alone will not suffice, / Unless we also have been wise, / And have our loves enjoy'd” (Sonnet III, ll. 12-14);¹² his justification is usually little more than physical appetite. On other occasions, however, Suckling takes a quite different position; rather than seize the moment, the lover in “Against Fruition” is advised,

Stay here, fond youth, and ask no more; be wise:
Knowing too much long since lost paradise.
The virtuous joys thou hast, thou wouldst should still
Last in their pride; and wouldst not take it ill,
If rudely from sweet dreams (and for a toy)
Thou wert wak'd? he wakes himself, that does enjoy.

(ll. 1-6)

Physical consummation, in this view, is like the Garden of Eden's forbidden fruit: it promises unlimited gratification yet it leaves nothing but emptiness. The wise lover who still has expectation and cannot “tell his store,” the conclusion puns, is truly rich; and conscious delusion is therefore preferable to harsh reality. The two kinds of values, one focusing upon the physical and the other upon the imaginative, counsel inherently contradictory courses; thus his canon includes poems that demand “Give me the woman here” and those that include “love in love.”¹³

Each of the uncompromising courses questions the traditional evaluation of love, but even the most extreme poems allow a degree of playful and witty ambiguity. “Against Fruition,” a succinct and pessimistic assessment of love, concludes that men blindly hope for “strange things to see, / That never were, nor are, nor e're shall be”; its arguments, however, are not a fortiori proof of Suckling's bitter cynicism. As the opening lines illustrate, the poem's dramatic quality is tonally suspect:

Fie upon hearts that burn with mutual fire!
I hate two minds that breathe but one desire.
Were I to curse th' unhallow'd sort of men,
I'd wish them to love, and be lov'd again.

(ll. 1-4)

While unmitigated disillusionment could conceivably prompt this outburst, its violence at least raises the possibility that the author is more concerned with the audience effect. Equally iconoclastic statements characterize the arguments which then totally reverse the normal attitude toward love; and if the speaker is serious in his denunciation, he is not too involved to miss the pun “sure I should die, / Should I but hear my mistress once say ay.” But the most disquieting feature is the poem's context, for the last lines reveal that the speaker has been addressing his mistress and all along has been building to the request that she deny him her sexual favors. The unique and effective reversal of the conventional seduction poem therefore determines the reasons the speaker advances and the vision of love he develops, and wit is more important than cynicism. The same is also true of the other apparently very cynical poem “Farewell to Love.” Although Suckling asserts at length that love is illusory, the conventional nature of this poem immediately questions his sincerity. Medieval and Renaissance poets had already established the rejection of love as a set piece, and Suckling seems to accept the challenge in his opening stanza:

Well-shadow'd landskip, fare ye well:
How I have lov'd you none can tell,
At least, so well
As he that now hates more
Than e'er he lov'd before.

(ll. 1-5)

The speaker, who underlines his self-discovery in the following stanza, has realized the deceptive nature of women, but there is some doubt whether he is more concerned with the betrayal or with his ability to articulate his discovery. When he must later again remind the reader, “Oh, how I glory now, that I / Have made this new discovery,” his exclamation is suspiciously excessive; and any emotional involvement is still further dissipated in the distracting manner with which he elaborately describes his perception. In detailing the reality he has found concealed behind an illusory beauty, the speaker insists that all women will now be for him only a memento mori; yet the macabre imagery becomes curiously sexual as he dismisses locks that “like two masterworms” curled over each ear “Have tasted to the rest / Two holes, where they like 't best.” This possible ambiguity at least questions his assurance that henceforth all women will provide a source of moral edification, and his real attitude is confirmed in the final pronouncement,

They mortify, not heighten me;
These of my sins the glasses be:
And here I see
How I have lov'd before.
And so I love no more.

(ll. 46-50)

If Suckling were serious, he would not allow the sexual pun “heighten me” to detract from the emphasis on mortification; by italicizing the last line the poet further undercuts his sincerity.¹⁴ Irony, not embittered rancor, is his design; and the entire poem is largely a clever and logical artistic game.

A completely cynical position would be as extreme as the distasteful “whining lover”; and Suckling, unable to find a middle ground, is sometimes forced to abandon the search to ensure the emotional self-possession which complements his mannered wit. The Petrarchan imitation “'Tis Now, Since I Sate Down Before” reveals the damaging consequences of this compromise. At the outset of the poem the speaker raises an interesting question:

'Tis now, since I sate down before
That foolish fort, a heart,
(Time strangely spent) a year and more,
And still I did my part …

(ll. 1-4)

While this introduction is primarily a pretense for the extended conceit that follows, the speaker is at odds with himself. The heart he tried to conquer was, he emphasizes, “foolish”; and still he parenthetically concedes that through this “strangely spent” experience he did his part. The ill-fated siege, moreover, is not unlike that of many Petrarchan lovers; outside of a possible pun in the decision “to lie at length, / As if no siege had been,” his actions are not unusual. The speaker willingly goes through the required gestures, and he lifts his attack only when he realizes “Honour” commands the metaphoric fortress. His refusal to parley with this giant is a distinct departure from the poetic norm, and the poem might end at this point with a cynical turn. Suckling, however, cannot resist an additional twist: in retreat the speaker concludes,

To such a place our camp remove,
As will no siege abide:
I hate a fool that starves her love,
Only to feed her pride.

(ll. 37-40)

The refusal to find anything but foolish pride in the lady's conduct compounds the note of cynicism, but the conclusion also introduces an unanticipated irony. The speaker, in a situation he cannot entirely control, is the real victim of pride; and his disdainful scorn is an obvious attempt to salvage his ego. Suckling himself is also guilty of a facile poetic maneuver. Although there is a hint of uncertainty on the part of the speaker in the opening stanza, the poem's dominant intention is the straightforward development of a traditional conceit. Thus the pretended new psychological insight at the end is tonally false and structurally disjointed. Like his speaker, Suckling beats a hasty retreat; the cynical pose affords a convenient refuge.

The contrived ending, which also occurs in poems not concerned with love,¹⁵ often results after the wit has been expended in a set piece; in the love poetry, however, it may also indicate the desire to maintain detachment. When the ironic perspective is absent, as it is in much of the previous poem, Suckling must abruptly draw back; he also has difficulty when the subject threatens to be overly serious. “Love's World,” for example, would be an even finer poem if the poet were less concerned about sustaining the absolute distinction between the “wise” and “honest” lovers. The poem, a highly artificial and ingenious exercise, defines the world of love in terms of the familiar relationship between the microcosm-macrocosm; Suckling, however, is very conscious of the elaborate conceit, and he calls attention to his own artifice. He also makes certain that his attitude toward love is apparent; the realm of love that he defines, as the first stanza has demonstrated, is the world “found / When first my passion reason drown'd.” Despite this negative view and the subsequent vein of realism, the poem does not cynically dismiss love. Fancy, hope, and “fond credulity” are a part of this experience, and the speaker does conceal his passion and is not totally preoccupied with the thought of his beloved; yet the love has a validity. The speaker reveals the extent of its attractiveness when he admits his hopes “Sometimes would be full, and then / Oh, too too soon decrease again.” Although this emotional involvement is only momentary, it obscures, perhaps unintentionally, the poem's conclusion. When the wit has run its course and the conceit is exhausted, Suckling abruptly stops:

But soft, my Muse, the world is wide,
And all at once was not descri'd:
It may fall out some honest lover
The rest hereafter will discover.

(ll. 67-70)

The ending, which achieves a somewhat sudden closure, reaffirms the speaker's image as a “wise” lover; although the conclusion entertains the possibility of a more enduring love unknown to his experience, it is also conceivable that the final stanza intends to dismiss ironically the “honest” lover. The tone is ambiguous, for Suckling's own position in the poem is not firmly resolved.

When he can distance himself, as he does in “A Ballad Upon a Wedding,” the need to conceal his own ambiguous attitude is less immediate; as a result the tonal complexity is more effective. With the persona of the rustic, Suckling creates a speaker completely outside his own identity; and the fictional context, the most complete development of the conscious posture, ensures a completely controlled freedom. Through the speaker, who with wide-eyed wonder narrates “things without compare,” Suckling presents his own version of the epithalamium; paradoxically his ironic acceptance of this venerable poetic form produces unique emotional immediacy. The yokel's eye-witness account, which appropriately begins with the traditional processional, ignores the ceremonial or ritualistic and realistically captures the little details. The groom, who appears to the speaker

                                                            one pest'lent fine
(His beard no bigger though than thine)
Walk'd on before the rest:
Our landlord looks like nothing to him;
The King (God bless him!), 'twould undo him,
Should he go still so dress'd.
At course-a-park, without all doubt,
He should have first been taken out
By all the maids i' the town,
Though lusty Roger there had been,
Or little George upon the Green,
Or Vincent of the Crown.

(ll. 13-24)

This humanized account counters the conventional exaggeration of the epithalamium with a distinctly unpoetic hyperbole, yet the praise succeeds. Obviously the king's treasure would scarcely miss the funds needed for this wedding, and a country landlord or a lusty Roger is a rather limited epitome of masculinity; in their very naiveté, however, these evaluations have a ring of sincerity. While the reader condescendingly smiles at the narrator's provincialism, he also realizes his unjaded innocence. Suckling, conscious of the limitations of any praise, imparts a ring of truth without seeming patronizing. Similarly the speaker's experience provides a refreshingly effective view of the bride; in his enthusiastic description,

No grape that's kindly ripe could be
So round, so plump, so soft as she,
Nor half so full of juice.
Her finger was so small, the ring
Would not stay on which they did bring,
It was too wide a peck;
And to say truth (for out it must)
It look'd like the great collar (just)
About our young colt's neck.

(ll. 34-42)

Truth may have been stretched a bit to impress his friend Dick, but the rural world invoked in the comparisons has a satisfying decorum; its apt originality successfully establishes both the lady's sensuousness and her daintiness. The grace and beauty developed in the blazon are also realized in the same manner, and the compliment culminates naturally in the speaker's declaration,

If wishing should be any sin,
The parson himself had guilty bin,
She look'd that day so purely;
And did the youth so oft the feat
At night, as some did in conceit,
It would have spoil'd him surely.

(ll. 73-78)

The poem juxtaposes the physical description and these sexual witticisms partly to avoid any possibility of cloying and insincere sentimentalism; but beauty and sexuality are also in accord with the spirit of the epithalamium. After the marriage is celebrated and as the consummation approaches, the sexuality implied in the first part of the poem becomes more overt. Activity now replaces the more static description in the poem's first half, and the tempo begins to gather momentum with the progressive accounts of the feasting, drinking, and dancing. The activity of the carousing people accentuates the wedding couple's desire to be finally alone, and their frustrated anticipation is vicariously experienced by all who help them celebrate. With masterful timing Suckling builds and prolongs this yearning; then he suddenly collapses the urgency in his final stanza:

At length the candle 's out, and now
All that they had not done they do:
What that is, who can tell?
But I believe it was no more
Than thou and I have done before
With Bridget and with Nell.

(ll. 127-132)

Unlike the coarseness found in “Upon My Lord Broghill's Wedding” or the innuendo in “That None Beguiled Be,” the sexuality is candidly and humorously accepted. The naturalness with which Suckling universalizes the sexual impulse is a characteristic of the epithalamium; and the witty turn, although his unique hallmark, also capitalizes upon the form's humorous potentiality. The final touch of realism, in keeping with the poem's tenor, modifies the grandeur found in much epithalamic poetry; but the romantic idealism is not dispelled. The real and the ideal are integral and complementary facets of the poem's vision of love.

In writing one of the great poems of the seventeenth century, Suckling momentarily found the form and vision that most nearly suited his poetic disposition. The orthodoxy of the epithalamium, like the other established kinds of poetry Suckling parodies, allows the bright court wit to display both his sophistication and his virtuosity. At the same time his entertaining and original performance maintains a detached, comprehensive perspective because the author can totally distance himself from the fictional narrator of this dramatic monologue. Freed from the self-consciousness of the other postures and encouraged by the nature of the epithalamium, Suckling is not constrained to compartmentalize love into the opposition of “wise” and “honest” attitudes. Although this poem may not in its synthesis represent Suckling's final vision of love, it is closer to his attitude than the popularized impression of the embittered cynic. Perhaps Suckling implied this in the poem “Upon A. M.” when he advises a lady,

Rather want faith to save thee, than believe
Too soon; for, credit me 'tis true,
Men most of all enjoy, when least they do.

(ll. 14-16)

In the context of the poem the paradox concludes an argument for a relationship based upon coy moderation, but the final line may also be a pun. The best gloss of this line and also of Suckling's love poetry is a statement by C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love: “cynicism and idealism about women are twin fruits on the same branch—are the positive and negative poles of a single thing.”¹⁶

Notes

1. Douglas Bush observes in English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (New York, 1962), “It is chiefly the cynical strain of the young Donne that Suckling carries on … ” (p. 122); and Fletcher Orpin Henderson extensively develops Suckling's libertine cynicism in “Traditions of Précieux and Libertin in Suckling's Poetry,” ELH, 4 (1937), 274-298. A more extreme characterization by C. V. Wedgewood in “Poets and Politics in Baroque England,” Penguin New Writing, 21 (1944), 123-136, suggests, “From his brilliantly accomplished verse, indeed, a savage, go-getting, tomorrow-we-die materialism emerges almost naked” (p. 135); in The Poetry of Limitation (New Haven, Conn., 1968) Warren L. Chernaik also concludes, “The sexual act has seldom been made to look less attractive” (p. 64). More qualified and comprehensive analyses by Robin Skelton in Cavalier Poets, Writers and Their Work No. 117 (London, 1960), pp. 18-26, and L. A. Beaurline in “‘Why So Pale and Wan’: An Essay in Critical Method,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (1962), 553-563, perceptively suggest the complexity of Suckling's poetry; the natures of each approach, however, necessarily limit the analysis.

2. “Out Upon It,” ll. 1-8. Although Suckling is credited with the authorship of the posthumous publications Fragmenta Aurea, 1646, and The Last Remains of Sir John Suckling, 1659, the extent of his contribution has been disputed (see L. A. Beaurline's “The Canon of Sir John Suckling's Poems,” Studies in Philology, 57 [1960], 492-518). In the absence of a standard edition, which is being edited by T. S. Clayton, Beaurline's suggestions have been largely followed; R. G. Howarth's Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1966) will be hereafter cited in the text.

3. See Ian Watt's discussion of irony in “The Ironic Tradition in Augustan Prose from Swift to Johnson,” pp. 21 ff. in Restoration & Augustan Prose (Los Angeles, 1956).

4. John Dryden's famous characterization occurs in “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (New York, 1961), I, 35; Beaurline suggests the link with Quintilian in “‘Why So Pale and Wan’: An Essay in Critical Method,” pp. 556 ff.; Shaftesbury's observations in “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1714), I, 62 ff., are also relevant.

5. Part of the game is, of course, the playfully deliberate redefinition of Carew into an excessively poetic romanticist, but the ultimate intention is the mock encomium. Lady Carlisle, the Stuart court well knew, hardly warranted Carew's effusive praise; and the final stanza, omitted from the first and subsequent editions but discovered by L. A. Beaurline and reproduced in “The Canon of Sir John Suckling's Poems,” Studies in Philology, 57 (1960), 495-496, bluntly climaxes the ironic ruse. In ending the game Suckling simultaneously asserts the superiority of his posture:

   ‘Troth in her face I could descry
   Noe danger, no divinity.
   But since the pillars were soe good
   On which the lovely fountaine stood,
   Being once come soe neere, I thinke
   I should have ventur'd hard to drinke.
   What ever foole like me had beene
   If I'd not done as well as seene?
   There to be lost why should I doubt
   Where fooles with ease goe in and out.

6. The last stanza of “Upon my Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden” is in a similar vein.

7. “Traditions of Précieux and Libertin in Suckling's Poetry,” ELH, 4 (1937), 289-290.

8. In a footnote Henderson cites Sonnet II, “There Never Yet Was Woman Made,” “Against Absence,” and “I Prithee Send Me Back My Heart.”

9. See A. J. Smith's “The Failure of Love: Love Lyrics after Donne” in Metaphysical Poetry, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 11 (New York, 1970), pp. 41-71. Smith's observations about Suckling should also be considered (see pp. 58 ff).

10. John Donne, “Loves Growth,” ll. 11-12, in The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965).

11. Chernaik argues that unlike the idealistic position of Lovelace, “Suckling's attitude is simpler: these ideals are frauds, and so are all others. Beauty is entirely in the eyes of the beholder, and honor and loyalty are equally products of self-delusion. … We are left with an impotent solipsism, where even choice (for whose priority Suckling is presumably arguing) is essentially meaningless” (pp. 63-64).

12. See also, for example, “Against Absence.”

13. Suckling's “Song” (p. 198) should be compared with his two poems “Against Fruition” (p. 194, p. 206).

14. This is Suckling's only use of italics. Although it ostensibly accentuates a firmness of resolution, the ploy is both poetically weak and unimaginative. Accepted at face value the conclusion is uncharacteristic of Suckling's wit; in the context of the poem, however, the italics are the final example of a disconcertingly obvious extremeness. Suckling, like another famous performer, “doth protest too much.”

15. See, for example, “A Sessions of the Poets.”

16. The Allegory of Love (New York, 1958), p. 145.