Poem of the Day: ‘Out Upon It’

Sir John Suckling (1609–1641) was a dilettante, back when the word truly meant something. An inveterate cardplayer, he invented the game of cribbage—while sending marked decks of beautiful playing cards as gifts to the aristocratic houses of England he might visit (and winning £20,000 as a result). A sportsman, as well, he was an regular cricket player, said to be the best bowler in England. He was even a political player, albeit on the losing side of the Royalists. And along the way, he wrote poetry. It’s hard to decide his rank among the Cavalier Poets who, loosely speaking, descended in the line of Ben Jonson, rejecting the metaphysical poetry that descended from John Donne. If Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Thomas Carew produced what’s often considered the greatest of Cavalier work, then Suckling probably comes next: at the bottom of the upper tier. With such poems as “Ballade upon a Wedding” and “Why so pale and wan, fond lover?” he remains spritely, clever, fun, and, as always, the talented dilettante. Here, in “Out Upon It,” he writes ballad-meter quatrains praising himself for being constant in love.