A Lover's Complaint - Form and Content

Form and Content

The poem consists of forty-seven seven-line stanzas written in the rhyme royal (with the rhyme scheme ababbcc), a metre and structure identical to that of Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece. In the poem, the speaker sees a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings, and other tokens of love. An old man asks the reason for her sorrow, and she responds by telling him of a former lover who pursued, seduced, and finally abandoned her. She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again:

O that infected moisture of his eye,

O that false fire which in his cheek so glow'd,

O that forc'd thunder from his heart did fly,

O that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow'd,

O all that borrowed motion seemingly ow'd,

Would yet again betray the fore-betray'd,

And new pervert a reconciled maid!