First published in 1713, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "The Lover: A Ballad" is one of my favorite poems. I love this poem because lurking beneath its sing-songy ballad form is a love poem that embodies all the complexity that a great love poem can embody. Montagu's poem is sweet, but it's sad. It's thoughtful, but it's playful. It's frustrated, but it's hopeful.
Essentially, the poem attempts to explain why it is that its speaker has been wrongly perceived as indifferent by her many suitors. She begins by inviting her interlocutor to viscerally look inside of her, to see "at once" the "inside of [her] breast."
There, the interlocutor will discover that the speaker's indifference to men is not some personal foible (her "nature); neither is that indifference the result of "fear" or "shame." Likewise, lest she be accused of being frigid, the speaker insists that she's "not so cold as a virgin in lead." And I love that line, not least because it's such a poetic and sly way of admitting that the speaker does, in fact, have desire -- this is no chaste nun we're encountering, willing to die without ever having loved, in other words. As the next line confirms, although she has a moral compass, her desires aren't circumscribed by "Sunday's sermon."
Once the speaker establishes that she really is a warm-blooded, desiring woman, she explains that the problem isn't her. It's men. They're all wrong. They're too arrogant, too flirtatious, too stupid, too selfish, or too indiscriminate. What the speaker wants is a man who can be a friend and a lover, who will be polite and decorous in public, but generous and giving in private: a man who can sit down "with chicken and champagne" (a line that appeals to my inner foodie) and let all the pretenses of courtship go.
Anyone who's been romantically involved with another person knows that moment when you can finally feel at home with your partner, when you can stop trying to impress them or convince them to be with you. And you can just be with them. Just as you are. Just as they are.
But as the last lines admit, the speaker hasn't encountered such a relationship. And her indifference, then, has been engendered by a series of ill-suited suitors:
"Before such pursuers the nice virgin flies:
And as Ovid has sweetly in parables told,
We harden like trees, and like rivers grow cold."
