The subject of love and war has been a very large theme in poetry and other types of writing for centuries. Great writers of every time period made their heroes balance on the fine line between love for their land, honor, and country and the women that they had relationships with. The writers which valued the love of a family to be more important would write their heroes in a way that accepted that honor and riches can come from that of a family. However, other writers, ones that were more focused on their freedom and country ultimately led their heroes to battle, assuming that their love would be directed elsewhere if not put on hold for a love far more powerful than that of a single woman. Richard Lovelace what such a poet who wrote based on his life and in his life he held the notion that going to war was a more reasonable path in life than being tied to a relationship. In his poem "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" Lovelace uses metre, his life background, and tone to convey his feelings that honor is more important than love.
When considering the formal aspects and structure of the poem one is instantly aware that the poem is written with a rhyme scheme of ballad metre. The initial reading of the poem gives the reader a basic sound of the rhyme being in an ABAB format, but when reading out loud and considering the second stanza it becomes more clear that the rhyme is following the iambic trimeter and tetrameter form of poetry. According to The Poetry Handbook iambic tetrameter is a line of four feet and is almost always broken with a pause. When reading from the beginning this is most obvious even in the first line of the poem in this way, "Tell me / not, Sweet, // I am / unkind," where the last word is broken into two syllables and the reader can hear a pause in between. At least half of the poem follows this same tetrameter structure. The other half of the lines of the poem are formatted in trimeter where the line is of three feet. For example, the last line can be broken down as follows, "Loved I / not Hon/ our more." This is a less obvious example of trimeter, but it is trimeter none the less. This rhyme scheme is not only easy to read, but moves the reader along in a way that might help them see that it resembles a ballad. Considering this concept the audience may also notice the reason the author wrote the poem in this way is to put stress and emphasis on certain aspects of the of the poem as well as create its tone and reveal the speakers need for honor.
Lovelace as a poet was considered to be part of a movement of writing called metaphysical poetry which, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means "highly intellectualized poetry marked by bold and ingenious conceits, incongruous imagery, complexity and subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression." This may explain his carelessness towards having a personal relationship with a female and instead a close tied relationship with war, he basically chooses death over nurture, it's not what many would consider a rational choice but it's the speakers choice and it mirrors the opinion of the poet. It does seem irrational at all when one looks at his life as a whole. Although Lovelace's poem seems to have the characteristics described by Websters dictionary it would be unfair to wholly group him into that genre of writers. He has enough reasoning to gallantly choose between what is more important to him. Love and comfort is most likely not at the top of his list where as political gain is.
The tone of the poem becomes quite obvious in the way it's written through the use of line breaks, punctuation, and dialect. The line breaks come at very natural moments that places emphasis on certain lines which the reader would have otherwise misread. The most prominent example is at the end of the second stanza where Lovelace decides to break into a new line and emphasize the importance of, "A sword, a horse, [and] a shield." He does this to show that these three objects are what he really needs to survive because they will carry him to victory and his faith in them will protect him and bring him honor. Lovelace also uses punctuation for specifically the use of commas to again give emphasis and importance to certain words and objects. By doing so he is giving the reader time to think about the word use. The pauses that the commas cause also brings to the poem an air of natural conversation. The critic, W. Carew Hazlitt of the Inner Temple, describes the poem as, "graceful, airy… nicely finished… delicate in expression…" (310). The dialect and word use in the poem is definitely so. Lovelace uses words such as sweet, chaste, embrace, adore and dear which soften the tone of the poem in many ways. The use of these words creates an overall mellow sound to the work It's like the speaker is breaking up with his lover, but making it seem as if it's really his loss and he too shall be hurt by it. His tone is calm, sweet, and rational in it's manner.
There are many factors which contributed to the writing of this poem. Lovelace wrote something that was a common theme in his life. His life as a royalist and his constant participation in war related efforts were always more accounted for than his personal relationships. Through the use of careful formatting he was able to turn the poem into a ballad, which would make sense in the time period that it may have been written to an actual woman. While explicating this work we see the theme of honor verses love through the use of literary elements.
Bibliography:
Hazlitt, Carew. "Lucasta. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, Esq., Now First Edited and the Text Carefully." JSTOR. University of Northern Iowa, n.d. Web. Feb. 2014.
Colin Burrow, ‘Metaphysical poets (act. c.1600–c.1690)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Feb 2009 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/95605, accessed 9 Feb 2014]
Jokinen, Anniina. "The Life of Richard Lovelace." Luminarium.
16 Feb 2003. .
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1962. Print.
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