Wednesday, May 20, 2026

"The Lady's Complaint"

In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, I recently read "The Lady's Complaint," a poem anonymously published in 1736, and I noticed two instances where the structure emphasizes the meaning.

The first stanza ends with the lines "A pain for us it is to love, / But is to men a pleasure," and the last stanza ends with the lines "More freedom give to womankind, / Or give to mankind less."  Both of these couplets feature a chiasm:
A pain
for us it is to love,
But is to men
a pleasure
and
More freedom
give to womankind,
Or give to mankind
less
The inverted order of these structures highlights the contrasts between "pain" & "pleasure" and "us" & "men" in the first couplet and between "more" & "less" and "womankind" & "mankind" in the second.

The line "Or give to mankind less" also contains a somewhat significant ellipsis.  "Freedom" from the previous line is implied but not explicitly stated ("Give to mankind less [freedom]"), and in a way, this omission matches the meaning of "less."