Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move,
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her.
The devil take her!

These lines are from Sir John Suckling’s lyric “Song” (often identified by its opening, “Why so pale and wan, fond lover?”), a Cavalier-era poem circulating in the 1630s and printed in collections of his poems shortly after his death. Suckling, a courtier of Charles I known for witty, urbane verse, writes in a tone that mocks the conventions of Petrarchan love-lament. The speaker addresses a “fond lover” whose pleading and sighing have failed to win an unwilling woman, urging him to stop performing courtship rituals that cannot change her mind. The brusque, comic impatience fits Suckling’s reputation for anti-romantic, socially knowing satire of fashionable love talk.

The speaker’s message is that desire cannot be coerced: if a woman does not choose love freely, no amount of theatrical suffering—“sighing,” “dying,” or other courtly gestures—will “move” her. The repeated “Quit, quit” turns the poem into a sharp rebuke of self-humiliating obsession and of the literary pose of the lovesick suitor. At the same time, the final outburst (“The devil take her!”) is deliberately excessive, exposing how quickly idealized devotion can flip into resentment when it is not reciprocated. Suckling’s wit lies in puncturing romantic pretension and insisting on emotional realism and self-respect.