Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

These lines come from Sir John Suckling’s lyric “Song” (“Out upon it, I have loved / Three whole days together”), a Cavalier-era poem written in the milieu of Charles I’s court in the 1630s. Suckling (1609–1642), known for witty, urbane verse and a rakish public persona, often treated love as a fashionable game rather than a solemn commitment. The poem belongs to the light, songlike tradition of courtly lyrics meant for circulation in manuscript and performance, where cleverness and social ease were prized. Its playful complaint about the brevity of passion reflects the period’s taste for irony and epigrammatic turns.

The speaker mock-laments that he has “loved” for an extravagantly long time—three days—suggesting that his affections are fickle and governed by mood, convenience, and circumstance (“If it prove fair weather”). The humor depends on deflating conventional love-poetry’s claims of constancy: what is usually presented as enduring devotion becomes a short-lived amusement. The weather metaphor implies that love is as changeable as the elements and that the lover’s fidelity is conditional. In a broader Cavalier context, the poem performs sophistication: it treats romantic intensity as something to be managed with wit and detachment, turning emotional volatility into social charm.