Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.
In this quote, the “wise man” advises the speaker that it would be better to give away money or valuable gemstones than his heart. The wise man makes the comparison to suggest that giving away love is extremely foolish. It’s a waste to just give away valuable objects, but he suggests doing so is far safer than giving away the heart. However, his tendency to see the heart as interchangeable with a valuable object also speaks to his own cynicism. Rather than viewing love as a relationship, he sees it as a transaction.
The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.
In the second stanza, the speaker again quotes from the “wise man,” who again casts love as a kind of transaction. Here, his advice subverts our expectations. When we read that the heart “was never given in vain,” we expect to hear that even though the heart is an expensive thing to give away, it’s ultimately worth it. After all, that’s usually what it means for something to not be “in vain,” as in when we say that someone did not “die in vain.” Yet the wise man actually uses the phrase in a purely literal sense, to mean that when the heart is given, we can expect something in return. In his case, what we get in return is “sighs a plenty” and “endless rue”—something bad in exchange, rather than something good. Undercutting our expectations by inverting a defense of love to instead be an indictment of it intensifies the wise man’s cynical condemnation. His tone comes off as bitter and sarcastic, as though he is saying, “yes, of course you get something in return—misery!”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
The final two lines of the poem also subvert our expectations as readers. Throughout the whole poem, the speaker has been lamenting the naivety and false pride of his young self. Because there are many works framed as the recollections of a much older speaker, and because the speaker seems to have grown and matured so much, we assume he is now much older than twenty-one. Yet here, in the poem’s final two lines, he reveals that he is actually only twenty-two years old at the time of writing. Suddenly, we realize that he is hardly more mature now than he was when he foolishly fell in love, and we see both his youthful optimism and his newfound cynicism as potentially naive.
