Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, from Prison”

Richard Lovelace (1618-1657) is not quite so famous as some of the other poets featured here on Influential Lyrics, but his work offers some of the best examples of “Cavalier Poetry”–a mode of writing that came into prominence in the middle years of the 17th century. The Cavalier Poets (so named because of their loyalty to King Charles I) produced dozens of poems that celebrate aspects of the “good life.” Beauty, love, friendship, and loyal dedication are among the key themes, all typically presented in a joyful live-for-today, carpe diem attitude.

Podcast Audio:

“To Althea, from Prison”

When Love with unconfined wings
   Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
   To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
   And fettered to her eye,
The gods that wanton in the air
   Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round,
   With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
   Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
   When healths and drafts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
   Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
   With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
   And glories of my king;
When I shall voice aloud how good
   He is, how great should be,
Enlargèd winds, that curl the flood,
   Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
   Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
   That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
   And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
   Enjoy such liberty.

Resources PDF:

Lovelace Resources Download

Podcast Script:

Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, from Prison,” script

If you’ve been listening to Influential Lyrics for a while, I’m sure you’ll recognize that most of the poets I’ve featured are very much A-list celebrities in the (admittedly small) world of English literary history. But Richard Lovelace is quite possibly an unfamiliar name to many listeners. Still, he has one poem that—more than any other—exemplifies a distinct poetic school that came to prominence in England in the middle years of the 17^th century. We’ll go into the historical and artistic details in a few minutes, but first let me read the poem. It may seem rather obscure—still, you may recognize a couple of lines toward the end (even if you’ve never heard of Lovelace!). So here is Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, from Prison”:

[poem]

An appreciation of this poem will likely benefit from a little historical context. Though there is some debate about this, Lovelace’s poem was probably written in 1642 while the poet was literally in prison. This was an extremely divisive moment in English politics with the King, Charles I, at odds with the Parliament—which he dismissed for over 10 years beginning in 1629. I won’t go into all the details except to say that 1642 marked the beginning of the English Civil War. Englishmen of any public stature—and Lovelace came from a wealthy land-owning family—had to choose sides. Would you be loyal to the King? Or would you be a supporter of the Parliament?

Lovelace was very much a royalist, siding with the King. In the jargon of the day, that made him a “Cavalier” (as opposed to the Parliamentary faction who were known as “Roundheads”). Lovelace, then, along with a few other poets like Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Edmund Waller and others, came to be known as the Cavalier poets of the 17^th century. The designation, though, is not merely a mark of political affiliation. There are also several stylistic and thematic characteristics that constitute a sort of Cavalier aesthetic. For example, instead of writing deep thoughts about mortality and the frailty of human happiness, these poems tend to celebrate the good life—love, beauty, friendship—often presented with a sort of carpe-diem, “live for today” attitude. With this background in mind, let’s work through the poem to see if we can make some sense of it.

The title of the poem already puts the speaker in a specific location—a prison cell—and writing about his specific experience of incarceration. As you’ll see, it’s not as awful as one might expect, especially when his beloved Althea pays him a visit:

So here the speaker is confined in prison, but then “unconfined Love” brings his “divine Althea” for a visit and she “whispers at the grates.” The guy is very much under the spell of love—he lies “tangled” in Althea’s hair and “fettered to her eye.” And note that words like “tangled” and “fettered” would typically suggest some sort of confinement or restraint, but paradoxically, for the speaker this bond of love offers a form of “liberty” that even the “gods that wanton in the air” can’t match.

So, the opening stanza focuses on the power of love to find freedom even in confinement. The second stanza then shifts from love to friendship. The scene is (loosely) a drinking party with the speaker and his fellow Cavaliers. It goes like this:

So, the poet and his friends are drinking these “flowing cups,” and the wine in the cups is not diluted with water from the Thames, the river that runs through London (that’s the meaning of that phrase “no allaying Thames”). And these happy fellows have “careless heads”—that is, “careless” in the sense of courageous and without fear, not in the more modern sense of neglectful—and they are bound together by “loyal flames,” a reference to their loyalty to the king and to one another. These Cavaliers continue drinking, drowning their grief in wine and offering “healths”—that is toasts like “to your health!” It’s such a scene of Cavalier camaraderie that even the fish that swim and drink freely in the ocean, aren’t as free as the speaker and his fellows. As the refrain puts it, “Fishes that tipple in the deep / Know no such liberty.”

The third stanza is ironically both more personal and more political—it’s a statement of the speaker’s loyalty to and even reverence for the King. It goes like this…

Here the speaker likens his own situation—confined in prison—to that of caged songbirds. (A linnet is a small bird in the finch family; they were sometimes kept in cages like canaries.) In this case, the speaker is the caged bird singing the “glories” and the greatness of his King. The stanza then closes with another statement of the refrain—in this case the speaker’s “liberty,” even while in prison, is greater than the winds that raise waves on the ocean. The “enlarged winds,” free as they are, don’t know the liberty felt by the speaker.

While the first three stanzas focus on specific catalysts of liberty (love, friendship, and loyal dedication), the final stanza offers a more general claim about the relationship between physical and spiritual freedom. The stanza opens with a couple of the most famous lines from all of 17^th-century poetry:

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;

The idea is simple enough, but very elegantly expressed. Stone walls and iron bars—iconic images of physical incarceration—can imprison the body but not the soul. If one is mentally and spiritually “innocent and quiet,” then physical incarceration is rather like a place for quiet contemplation analogous to an “hermitage” for a religious devotee. Lovelace then concludes with the poem’s central claim:

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

So, the freedom of love and the freedom one feels in one’s soul, for the purposes of this poem at any rate, offer a kind of liberty that can only be enjoyed by Angels themselves, presumably soaring above and wholly devoted to the Divine order.

So that’s Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, from Prison.” It’s not a difficult poem to understand, particularly when we have the historical background about the Cavaliers and the English Civil War. But I would suggest that there’s something more to the poem than simply an illustration of an historical event. This “something more,” I would argue, has everything to do with poetry and poetic form. Let me explain….

A purely technical description of the poem’s prosody finds that it is made up of four, eight-line stanzas, each of which has six lines of “content” (that is, the love, friendship, loyalty bits) followed by a refrain—the repeated “Know no such liberty.” The lines are short, and “sing-songy” with emphatic rhymes and a strongly musical feel. (In fact, each stanza is, formally speaking, a double ballad stanza.). What’s more, the repeated refrain lines are all identical, except for the last one where “Know no such liberty” becomes the angels above who “Enjoy such liberty.” The repetitive patterning with this twist at the very end provides a sense of closure or “finished-ness” to the poem.

Now…So what? You say…

Well, think about what happens when you shape language, focusing on the sound of words—that’s what rhyme is after all: a repetitive sound: Or, like a refrain, which is a repeated line. These patterns of repetition mark this as poetic language rather than the ordinary prose of the world. If you think about the world of language that we live in all the time… we are constantly bombarded by noise, music, and words, words, words, words—from the newspaper, to social media posts, to the dialogue on TV or whatever—we are constantly surrounded by words. And this ordinary language has a kind of evanescent quality. We listen to the words, we understand them, then they move on and disappear as we move on to the next thing. But, when language is all of a sudden shaped into patterns with this emphasis on rhythm and meter and rhyme and the like, then the language takes on a kind of self-contained integrity. It takes this language out of the ubiquitous flow of words that we’re constantly surrounded by and gives it a shape and form that outlasts the moment of its utterance.

One analogy might be the frame on a painting. If you look around you wherever you happen to be at the moment, you’ll note that there is a whole visual field in front of you. There are objects you see, but for the most part don’t even notice as you make your way through your world. But then—as is familiar if you’ve taken a picture with your phone—when you frame things in an image, you take the subject out of the general flow of experience and grant it a sort of integrity and permanence. That tree that you’ve walked by a thousand times but never really noticed becomes an object of beauty and contemplation when it’s framed and hanging on the wall.

I’d like to suggest that a similar process happens in a poem like “To Althea”—and in most poems in traditional forms. The prosody of the poem—all these repetitive sound patterns like meter, rhyme, refrains, and the like—takes language out of the general flow of words and grants it a sense of closure and “finishedness.” Now it becomes something like a framed work or art that you can hang on your mental wall (so to speak) and that you can come back to to listen or read again and again.

So, that’s my take on Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, from Prison” and a bit extra on the power of poetic language.

[poem]

ETC…

Podcast Citation (MLA 9th ed.)

Grimes, Kyle. “Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea, from Prison.’” Influential Lyrics, hosted by Kyle Grimes, episode 1.6. [date,] [web URL.]

and finally…

Influential Lyrics podcast, 1.4, published March 2025

Influential Lyrics