The Unfortunate Lover Summary
Andrew Marvell

The Unfortunate Lover Overview

"The Unfortunate Lover" is a poem by early modern English poet Andrew Marvell. It is a narrative, rather than a love poem, using the story of an unfortunate young orphan in love to comment on the sorrows of life. The poem relies on many tropes of romantic courtship of the early modern period. The poem was initially published in Marvell's 1681 volume, Miscellaneous Poems. The volume was published posthumously, and contained poems he had written throughout his full career, from 1621 to 1678.