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?

John Suckling (1609–1642) was a Caroline court poet and wit associated with the “Cavalier” lyric tradition—polished, urbane love poetry shaped by courtly manners and a lightly ironic tone. The quatrain comes from one of his short love songs/lyrics in which the speaker addresses an unresponsive beloved. Such poems circulated in manuscript and in early printed collections of Suckling’s poems during and shortly after his lifetime, reflecting the period’s fashion for epigrammatic, rhetorically balanced stanzas about desire, exchange, and refusal. The diction (“prithee,” “thine”) and the conceit of hearts being traded are characteristic of seventeenth‑century amatory verse.

The speaker frames love as a reciprocal exchange: if the beloved will not “part” with her heart, she has no right to keep his. The logic is mock-legal and transactional, turning emotional vulnerability into a neat argument. That tension—between sincere hurt and witty self-possession—is typical of Suckling’s style, where courtly love conventions are both used and gently undercut. The quatrain dramatizes the imbalance of unrequited affection: giving one’s heart without return feels like a loss of property and self. At the same time, the poised rhyme and rhetorical symmetry suggest the speaker’s attempt to regain control through language when he cannot control the beloved’s feelings.