With spots quadrangular of diamond form, Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife, And spades, the emblems of untimely graves.

Cowper’s lines treat the suits of playing cards as a symbolic vocabulary. Diamonds become “spots quadrangular,” reduced to cold geometry; hearts are “ensanguined,” suggesting blood and passion; clubs are linked to conflict (“strife”); and spades—tools for digging—are cast as signs of premature burial. The effect is to darken an everyday amusement into a miniature allegory of human life: desire, violence, and death are latent in the images we handle casually. The diction (“typical,” “emblems”) underscores a moralizing, emblem-book sensibility, turning a common object into a meditation on mortality and the costs of worldly diversion.