To a Lady that Desired I Would Love Her

Now you have freely given me leave to love,
What will you doe?
Shall I your mirth, or passion move,
When I begin to wooe;
Will you torment, or scorn, or love me too?

Each petty beauty can disdain, and I
Spight of your hate
Without your leave can see, and dye;
Dispense a nobler Fate!
’Tis easy to destroy, you may create.

Then give me leave to love, & love me too
Not with designe
To raise, as Loves cursed rebels doe
When puling Poets whine,
Fame to their beauty, from their blubber’d eyne.

Grief is a puddle and reflects not clear
Your beauty’s rayes;
Joyes are pure streames, your eyes appear
Sullen in sadder layes,
In cheerfull numbers they shine bright with prayse.

Which shall not mention to express you fayr
Wounds, flames, and darts,
Storms in your brow, nets in your hayr,
Suborning all your parts,
Or to betray, or torture captive hearts.

I’ll make your eyes like morning suns appear,
As mild, and fayr;
Your brow as Crystall smooth, and clear,
And your dishevelled hayr
Shall flow like a calm Region of the Ayr.

Rich Nature’s store (which is the Poet’s Treasure)
I’l spend, to dress
Your beauties, if your Mine of Pleasure
In equall thankfulness
You but unlock, so we each other bless.

Thomas Carew (1595-1640) turned his back on a career in law in favour of the court of Charles I, where he was appointed “server at table” to the king. If conversation had been included among the server’s royal duties, no doubt His Majesty would have enjoyed the delicacies of Carew’s elegant, sometimes double-edged geniality and wit.

Carew’s major poems are A Rapture and the Elegy Upon the Death of Dr. Donne, the first a surfeit of erotic metaphor, the latter an encomium illustrating the writer’s sound critical judgment. No less adroit in argument or craft, this week’s poem is eloquent on a smaller scale. It may have been conceived as a song. The University of Michigan Library’s digital collections, where I found the above (slightly edited) text, credits its source as: “Poems, with a maske by Thomas Carew…; the songs were set in musick by Mr Henry Lawes.”

The seventh stanza is excluded from some versions of the poem, but it’s an important asset. The exchange Carew is proposing to the lady in that stanza is a sexual one, appropriately the poem’s climax. He promises to raid the store of poetic figures provided by “Rich Nature”, in return for access to the woman’s “Mine of Pleasure”. And this last turn of the argument helps to define the “Love” in the title. The form of love the lady desires should probably be interpreted as “praise”. She’s asking for an admiring poem, not necessarily for any further, lover-like engagement. The poet concedes at the end, and names his price.

In the intervening six stanzas, the focus becomes increasingly writerly. Carew is imagining his praise-poem-to-be in terms of courtly sonnet conventions. “Will you torment, or scorn, or love me too?” is a question about the matter of his own literary response. The comment that “each petty beauty can disdain” is itself faintly disdainful, and no poetic defeat is envisaged: “I / Spight of your hate / Without your leave can see, and dye.” He will compose a love poem anyway, but that fine last couplet proclaims a better alternative: “Dispense a nobler Fate! / ’Tis easy to destroy, you may create.”

Carew is scornful both of the poet who whinges about unrequited love, and the woman who resists the lover’s advances so as to propel him to further descriptive heights when evoking her good looks. This is an unfamiliar view of those familiar co-dependents, the rejecting woman and the tearful reject. The desolate poet becomes a foolish rather than a tragic figure. Carew enjoys some moments of near disgust: “cursed rebels”, “puling Poets”, “blubber’d eyne”. The poet, he argues, won’t be able to do justice to the lady’s beauty if his eyes are dull and swollen with blubbering. The image of “grief” as a “puddle” is an arresting one, suggesting both minimal importance and a muddiness that’s reflected in the description of the lady’s eyes, which also “appear / sullen in sadder layes”. Only joy can produce “pure streames” of light, and the literary representation befitting praise.

Carew wants to be “fayr” to the woman: stoutly he asserts in stanza five that he won’t attempt to express her attractions by means of negatives. At the same time, he has an impressive list of what they might be: “Wounds, flamesdarts, / Storms in your brow / nets in your hayr. The verb “suborn” implies falsification, and an act of betrayal. He will err in the other direction, and pile on the compliments: “I’ll make your eyes like morning suns appear … / And your dishevelled hayr / Shall flow like a calm Region of the Ayr.”

What a master of lineation and cadence Carew shows himself to be in these verses. Of the two-, three- and five-stress pattern of each stanza, the final fifth line is effective in a variety of ways. Here it creates a marvellous sensation of silky smoothness.

Is there a hint of tawdriness in the poem’s somewhat transactional view of sex? Perhaps, but it’s offset by both the frankness and the subtly comic exaggeration of the poet’s self-exposure. There’s an implication that he and the woman in question are evenly matched in their craft and craftiness. Both will finally be fully satisfied with an exchange that has even acquired a certain pious, scriptural resonance from the happily rhymed coupling of “thankfulness” and “bless”.