“So here restraint

holds up delight”:
Convention and
Fantasy in Suckling’s
Love Lyrics
By Andrew N. Adler

Copyright © 1995 by Andrew N. Adler. All rights reserved.

 Adler 1

Some scholars have defended Sir John Suckling against the common charge that his “best

work is charming but trivial” by reference to his wit.1 Others note his psychological awareness.

In particular, he has been praised for refashioning and revitalizing Neo-Platonic and Petrarchan

conventions in a “reflective, self-observing” mode.2 Rarely, however, have commentators

bothered to engage in close readings of Suckling’s major works. By so doing, this presentation

attempts to show how Suckling’s wit and psychological acumen mutually reinforce each other.

In particular, I examine four lyrics about the mutability of sexual love. Each

demonstrates, in a similar way, how a poetic voice trying to shun conventional literary formulas

inevitably remains dependent on those very formulas. Each creates a division of power between

the poet and his beloved that is eventually exposed as artificial and unworkable. Finally, each

invites the reader to note the interactions between the parallel universes of how people fantasize

and how they express these fantasies through fiction-writing. I discuss Suckling’s “Sonnet I” and

then “Sonnet II,” showing how one can read the two as a progressive sequence. Similarly, I

analyze “Against Fruition [I]” and “Against Fruition [II]” in turn.

“Sonnet I” probes the “mystery” of desire’s impermanence and reluctantly hints that

Petrarchan notions cannot fully explain the phenomenon. Even the famous opening lines —

“Dost see how unregarded now / That piece of beauty passes?” — question the objectivity of the

conventional poetic voice. The poet tries to force the implied reader to verify the poet’s

assessment of his situation. (Later, the poet hopes that “some kind power” will substitute as the

objective arbiter (ll. 13-14).) But, the woman clearly is not “unregarded”: the poet actively

scrutinizes her face in both the first and second stanzas. Also, “passes” means both “fades” and

“walks by.” Thus, although below the poet insists that the woman’s looks have not changed at

all, the poem here subtly suggests otherwise.

Indeed, even before turning to “Sonnet II,” we find the narrator of “Sonnet I” becoming

somewhat defensive about his creed of Petrarchan stasis. He too often insists that conventional

1See MacLean 253 n. 1.

2See especially Miner 224-40; Richmond 245-47.
 Adler 2

explanations will suffice, even as he realizes that the “mystery” of love eludes them. Unlike

Donne, Suckling here does not solve the mystery by perceiving that personalities change over

time.3 The narrator claims that neither his “flesh,” “blood,” nor eyes and mind vary at all. Unlike

Thomas Stanley, Suckling does not openly dismantle the traditional rhetoric by emphasizing its

necessary yet false premise that the love-object’s beauty remains perpetually superior.4 Instead,

in the heart of the poem, Suckling abruptly halts his barrage of clichés to ask in frustration,

Oh! some kind power unriddle where it lies,

Whether my heart be faulty, or her eyes?

Yet, instead of pursuing the question in earnest, the narrator begins the verbiage anew (“kill” and

“die”) and by fiat forecloses discussion: “Neither her power, then, nor my will / Can questioned

be.”

The speaker’s state of mind helps to account for his reluctance to break out of

comfortable convention. He best preserves his delicate ego by denying both that his ex-lover

might be less attractive than he had thought and that his own virility might have waned. That is,

the “kind power” will not prove kind after all, since it will certainly find “fault” with the poet’s

taste or passion.

Ironically, however, the poet’s reluctance to flout convention actually demonstrates his

incipient power to construct a linguistic reality partly of his own choosing. He pretends to “see”

3Donne, in The Second Anniversary, writes:

Dost thou love
Beauty? (and beauty worthiest is to move)
Poor cozened cozener, that she, and that thou,
Which did begin to love, are neither now;
You are both fluid, changed since yesterday;
Next day repairs, (but ill) last day’s decay.
Nor are, (although the river keep the name)
Yesterday’s waters, and today’s the same.
So flows her face, and thine eyes, neither now
That saint, nor pilgrim, which your loving vow
Concerned, remains; but whilst you think you be
Constant, you’are hourly in inconstancy (ll. 390-400).
Suckling’s labeling of Petrarchan courtship and beauty as “cozenage” (in “Loving and Beloved,” l. 16, and in
“Sonnet II,” l. 10) appear to echo Donne’s lines (first published in 1612). Note, too, that in “Woman’s Constancy,”
Donne sarcastically implies that this sort of argument simply constitutes a rationalization to cast off an unwanted
lover (ll. 4-5).
4Stanley, “Changed, Yet Constant,” reprinted in MacLean 358-60.
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objectively, while making it very clear that he’s viewing the world through Petrarchan lenses.

The reader, whom the poet invites to look upon the same scene with the same lenses, is tempted

to exclaim, “That woman’s power can be questioned, because you gave her that deadly (literary)

power.”

In fact, the poet retains the power to “mark” the “fate” of beauty (l. 5), only to relinquish

that power in the final line (wherein the “fate” of beauty is “hidden”). In one sense, the poet

simply claims that he comprehends the effect of changing emotions, but not the cause. In another

sense, though, his use of the identical word (“fate”) in both places asserts his prerogative as

writer to frame and answer his own riddles.

I now turn to the multi-tiered relationship between the mutually-illuminating

“companion” poems, “Sonnet I” and “Sonnet II.” To begin with, if I’m correct in suggesting that

the first lyric points to its own artificiality and subjectivity, then it tests the limits of its conceit

almost to the breaking point. But since, as Blake realized, “You never know what is enough

unless you know what is more than enough,” “Sonnet II” logically follows suit, appearing to

destroy traditional modes of expression altogether. Yet the second poem tests its own limits in a

manner analogous to the first poem’s strategy.

On the tropological level, both sonnets invoke the conventional “red and white” and

“marking” of faces (via beauty patches in the second sonnet), and both summon a supernatural

power to enact or explain those aspects of desire that the poet supposedly cannot achieve or

fathom. Both propose that history obscures true causes: In “Sonnet I,” the mysteries of love

“have certain periods set,” whereas in the second poem, “some, long ago” created the arbitrary

conventions of love.

Structurally and psychologically, the twin poems possess a remarkable similarity: In

each, the respective poetic voice claims some robust power while disclaiming some other,

mysterious power. Thus, in “Sonnet I,” the poet avers that he can powerfully react to feminine

beauty, but that such beauty itself is mysteriously fixed. In “Sonnet II,” on the other hand, the

poet asserts that he can arbitrarily define beauty, but that he can react to it only after Cupid
 Adler 4

mysteriously sparks his interest. In each case, though, the text dramatizes that it actually retains

some of the power that it purports to disclaim and, symmetrically, that it may not hold the power

that it optimistically asserts.

To perceive “Sonnet II”’s repudiation of power, consider its explication of the origin of

beauty. The poet “choos[es] new” his “fancy,” (which then conjures up an impression of

“beauty”), yet some active agency lies behind that choice. Fancy is produced by “cozenage” (l.

10) and “trick” (l. 24); both words imply deliberate action, presumably of Cupid (l. 1), who

predisposes the lover to a “mad” preference. Still, to some extent, the poet controls Cupid.5 That

“boy” is, after all, a conventional figure consciously introduced by Suckling to represent

psychological mysteries. Consequently, Suckling could have erased references to Cupid and

substituted some other, less blind and juvenile, device. The poem’s finale effectively does so:

So to the height and nick

We up be wound,
No matter by what hand or trick.

This passage owes much to the poet’s hand or trick. For example, in a timepiece

metaphor, we might expect “nick” to rhyme with “tick,” so that “trick” is a witty textual trick

when combined with “hand,” which connotes the hour hand in a similar metaphor within another

Suckling poem.6 Yet, similar to the narrator in “Sonnet I,” the lover in “Sonnet II” does not want

to assume complete responsibility for his affections and perceptions. He thus persists throughout
in blaming some external trickster for his initial madness.

As mentioned above, another shared aspect of the two sonnets is that each of their

narrators also claims to have greater power in love than we find plausible. The first narrator

suspiciously boasts assured virility. More radically, the second narrator bravely defies the

soothing confines of Petrarchan imagery. He refuses to place any limits upon his fancy. Since the

reader cannot believe that anyone would actually prefer a lover with “black and blue”

complexion, the reader at once calls the poem’s counter-authority into question.

5Indeed, why would the poet bother to flatter that “kind” boy unless Cupid could potentially be influenced?
6“That none beguiléd be by time’s quick flowing” (ll. 13-14).
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Because each poem undermines its own vision, the poems force the reader himself to

demarcate the proper role and limits of a lover’s imagination. That is, because power is

unreliably claimed and disclaimed in these poems, they ingeniously shift power to the reader,

who notices that love and beauty are generated at the intersection of conventional and creative

(poetic) power. Indeed, Cupid’s perspective and the narrator’s perspective become the raw

materials out of which the reader builds a more coherent and less emotionally fragile world-view

than the texts admit at first glance.

This same dynamic operates at an even more intriguing level in the “Against Fruition”

poems,7 to which I now turn. For, these poems present the creation of erotic desire as an act of

fiction-writing along a continuum between the generic and the unreadably avant garde.

“Fruition I” concocts a fantasy in which, although consummation inevitably follows a

prescribed plot, it is possible to suspend one’s foreknowledge of that plot:

Women enjoyed, whate’er before they’ve been,

Are like romances read, or sights once seen;
Fruition’s dull, and spoils the play much more
Than if one read or knew the plot before.

Unfortunately, however much the narrator would like to keep himself guessing, if he

knows the generic romantic plot beforehand, then his imagination will in any event leap ahead

and effectively extinguish the excitement. The “expectation” that sex will prove amazingly
unique this time around compares to “Sonnet II”’s unrealistic hope that the poet can choose

beautiful colors from an entirely new palette. But, in fact, love’s “plot” is “always already” partly

contained in one’s imagination and partly an infusion of cultural background material: the

moment of fruition has already passed.8

This deflation of the poet’s advice is worked out in the text’s repeated insistence of a

dichotomy between “knowing”9 what is in store and “something” else (l. 25). When the poet

7For brevity’s sake, I hereinafter refer to these poems as “Fruition I” and “Fruition II.”
8“This is a vast commonplace of literature: the Woman copies the Book. In other words, every body is a citation: of
the ‘already-written.’ The origin of desire is the statue, the painting, the book” (Barthes 33).
9See ll. 2, 13, 22, 24, 29.
 Adler 6

attempts to give us a more precise idea of this latter (vague, expectant) state, he initially likens it

to a dream state (from which one might choose to “wake oneself” via fruition). Suckling penned

this verse (shortly) before Descartes published his Meditations, and Suckling could not have

realized that the problem of proving that one is not dreaming (at any given moment) remains

intractable even today. Still, the poet understood that individuals cannot wake themselves up or

continue dreaming at will.

Later, the poet gives another version of his fantasy, in which fruition destroys wealth (l.

7): “They who know all the wealth they have, are poor; / He’s only rich that cannot tell his store”

(ll. 29-30). The kernel of truth in this assessment, however, takes on a pessimistic connotation

when we note that Suckling borrowed this conceit from Ovid’s description of Narcissus at the

pool:

Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it. What I desire, I have.
My very plenty makes me poor.10

In this context, we realize that the boy who should not gaze into the pool will be the very one

who cannot resist. That is, the fatal instant in which Narcissus “knows” his store is preordained.

Further, this inexorable urge to consummation, beyond its psychological accuracy, also

represents a warning to those who aspire to act beyond the pale of conventional, culturally-

induced desire. The poet suggests that he can buy a generic romance without finishing it or

otherwise figuring out the plot. Yet he predicates his own advice upon a known plot — namely,

Ovid’s. That is, the poet at least partly knows his own textual “store.” Therefore, for example,

we can interpret the lines, “So here restraint / Holds up delight,” to mean that the poet restrains

himself from plagiarism: The enjoyment of poem-writing (as in sexual love) derives from re-

working of Petrarch, Ovid, and Donne, from variations on generic themes. There’s no serious

question of weaving a new plot wholly from one’s dreams or of copying past experience

verbatim. Instead, here, as in the sonnets, it devolves upon the reader to build from the

10Ovid 86.
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deconstructed ruins of the “mysterious” poetic fantasy (of empowerment and disempowerment) a

realistic vision of love that combines convention with imagination.

While “Fruition II” certainly represents a facetious enterprise in some respects, it also

will bear the same kind of (relatively sophisticated) interpretation to which I’ve subjected the

above poems. Notice, first, that “Fruition II” repeats the metaphor of fancy partaking its “true”

delight during a dream state that awakens at “full” fruition. Here, the text repeats “Fruition I”’s

“error” of trying to make epistemological distinctions based upon whether the narrator is

dreaming or awake and upon whether he has crossed some mythical boundary of (full) fruition as

opposed to mere expectation.

Second, “Fruition II” perpetrates the maneuver in which a text replete with Petrarchan

imagery pretends to cast off entirely its dependence on such imagery and to fabricate a new

vision of love out of “mere air” (l. 5). Compare the related stances of the following lines.

“Fruition I” declares:

Women enjoyed, whate’er before they’ve been,

Are like romances read, or sights once seen…

In contrast, “Fruition II” concludes:

Then, fairest mistress, hold the power you have,

By still denying what we still do crave;
In keeping us in hopes strange things to see,
That never were, nor are, nor e’er shall be.

The first poem locates a fictitious past moment during which the women were still “unread.” The
second poem looks forward to a future moment in which the mistress, who currently harbors

traditional trappings (she’s the “fairest”…), will break free and write in a new idiom.

This latter fantasy, though, also disintegrates in a now-familiar way: On the one hand, the

poet has given his lover her alleged “power.” Thus, he can’t expect her to show him anything

surprising. He has, and always will, view her through the artifice of Petrarchan stasis. In this

poem, as opposed to “Fruition I,” Suckling effectively rewrites the verb tense and in the process

turns “expectation” from a “blessing” (“Fruition I,” l. 23) into a “monster” (“Fruition II,” l. 15).
 Adler 8

But, the different semantic perspective doesn’t alter the writer’s psychology or his text’s

structural mechanism. His imagined dichotomies, including his divisions of power between

subject and love-object, dissolve.

On the other hand, this poem advances beyond the ones I have previously examined by

expressly indicating its self-generation of fantastic paradox: In the final lines, quoted above, the

poet finds himself “craving” a convention-free love affair that he knows has never existed and

never will exist. Yet at the moment when he thus concedes his debt to tradition, he has surpassed

old formulae by expressing in an original way the perennial anxiety of influence in love poetry.
 Adler 9

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.

Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A. J. Smith. London: Penguin, 1986.

MacLean, Hugh, ed. Ben Jonson & the Cavalier Poets: A Norton Critical Edition. New York:

Norton, 1974.

Miner, Earl. The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Mary M. Innes. London: Penguin, 1955.

Richmond, H. M. The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1964.

Suckling, John. Fragmenta Aurea. 1646. Ben Jonson & the Cavalier Poets: A Norton Critical

Edition. Ed. Hugh MacLean. New York: Norton, 1974. 253-71.