To Lucasta, Going to the Wars Analysis

Ballad MeterLet's get the nitty gritty stuff out of the way, shall we? The odd-numbered lines of "To Lucasta" are in a meter called iambic tetrameter. All that means is that there are four (tetra-)...

Dude's hawkish if you ask Shmoop. We mean really. He's willing to ditch his honey (who sounds really awesome, by the way) for battle, where he might get shot and die? Now that's patriotic zeal.This...

While this may be a poem about heading off to war, it takes place decidedly on the home front. After all, our speaker is still trying to explain himself to Lucasta, who's definitely not headed into...

The poem's title pretty much sums up what happens in the poem: the speaker says adios to his honey (whose name is Lucasta) and heads off to the battlefield, hat in hand… sort of. Based on what we...

LucastaLovelace wrote a rather large number of poems about Lucasta, and he even titled one of his collections of poetry Lucasta (1649). And it's not like Lucasta is the most common of names. So if...

(2) Sea LevelAs far as 17th-century poems go, "To Lucasta" keeps it simple. There really isn't any difficult vocabulary and the syntax is pretty clear. And, as a bonus, the poem's overall themes ar...

Richard Lovelace died in abject poverty, and it is rumored that he died in a cellar. Nobody is quite sure when he died either. What a way to go, right? (Source.) As if dying in obscurity weren't ba...

PGThe word "breast" might stir up a giggle or two, but they're compared to a nunnery, so there's not much steam being stirred in this one. It's safe for the kiddos.