I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why then shouldst thou have mine?

These lines come from Sir John Suckling’s lyric “Song” (often identified by its opening, “I prithee send me back my heart”), a Cavalier-era poem written for courtly circulation in the 1630s and first printed posthumously in collections of his poems. Suckling’s love lyrics characteristically adopt a witty, conversational tone that both performs and mocks the conventions of Petrarchan devotion. Here the speaker addresses an unresponsive beloved in the idiom of gallant courtship, treating “hearts” as exchangeable tokens in a social economy of love and favor. The poem’s playful bargaining reflects the period’s taste for light, epigrammatic songs meant to be read or sung in elite settings.

In these lines the speaker stages love as a kind of exchange or contract: if the beloved will not “part” with her heart, she has no right to keep his. The archaic courtesy (“I prithee”) masks a sharper, almost legalistic demand for reciprocity. The wit lies in treating emotional attachment as property that can be reclaimed, a characteristic move in Caroline-era lyric where courtship often becomes a game of bargaining, teasing, and self-protective irony. The stanza also hints at the vulnerability beneath the bravado: the speaker’s only defense against unreturned love is to insist on withdrawing his own heart before it is further “kept” or possessed by another.