Friendship

The ancient fable of the ant and the grasshopper can be seen as a narrative about fair-weather friendships. The grasshopper, previously mocking towards the more responsible ant, desires his company and friendship only when winter comes and he is at risk for starvation. The ant, meanwhile, turns the grasshopper away, into the danger of the winter months and the lack of food that it entails.

Despite being based upon this fable, Lovelace’s poem takes an altogether different approach towards the concept of friendship. Friendship is associated with all that is warm and good: with home, with comfort, with safety, even with religious piety.

The poem is dedicated, in its subtitle, to “my friend, Mr. Charles Cotton.” Cotton was, like Lovelace, a cavalier poet, a member of a school devoted to King Charles I at a time when public support for him was waning in advance...