Praising a great lady in verse is risky. Lay the flattery on too thickly and it reads like a bill for services rendered. Anne Killigrew's song for the Duchess of Grafton, disguised under the pastoral name Alinda, avoids this with a clever twist. She does not say that Alinda is so lovely that men suffer. She says that Alinda's loveliness is so well governed that no one does. The central idea is that someone can have every gift (looks, wit, wealth, rank) and be admired by everyone and coveted by no one, because virtue turns desire into respect.
The poem begins by summoning a particular viewer: "TH'ambitious Eye" that wants to find "Where Beauties Wonders most are shown." The eye is greedy and aspiring, and it sets up the vocabulary of looking that runs through the song: "gaze," "see," "admir'd," and later "admire" and "adore." By the second stanza Killigrew has piled up Alinda's gifts, an "unmatch't Form," a matching mind, "Estate, and Title." Then she reframes them as "A Charge Heaven dares to few commit." A charge is both a trust and a burden, so these gifts become a responsibility, and "few, like her, can manage it." The stanza's last couplet is knotty, with its clauses running back to front, and its exclamation mark sounds slightly breathless. The achievement is not having wit, greatness and beauty but carrying them "Without all Blame or Envy."
The third stanza is the most inventive. Killigrew picks up a stock figure of love poetry, the woman whose beauty kills, and hands Alinda "Murd'ring Weapons." But Alinda uses them "first Herself with them to shield," and never "in proud Disport," for the sport of it, like a hunter who kills for pleasure. The cruel mistress of convention is turned inside out. Violent words such as "slaughter," "Destroy" and "wounds" appear only to be denied, which makes the denial vivid. The stanza closes on a balanced antithesis, "Great are her Charmes, but Vertue more," and a tidy paradox: "She wounds no Hearts, though All adore."
The last stanza makes the paradox explicit. Normally "Am'rous Beauty Love invites," and passion answers passion. Alinda, "The Paragon," breaks that rule and "Kindles in none a fond desire." The comparison that follows lifts the compliment out of the ballroom and into politics. Admiring Alinda is like applauding a king's "Renown / And State" without wanting to seize his crown. The simile suggests that desiring her would be a kind of presumption, almost treason. Admiration here looks upward, with reverence rather than appetite. The poem ends on the word "Crown," which seems the right place for it.
The form supports this. The song is four six-line stanzas of rhyming couplets (aabbcc), in short lines of about eight syllables with a regular iambic beat. The couplets close quickly and neatly, and many read like maxims: "Great are her Charmes, but Vertue more." Rhymes such as "shield" and "weild," "invites" and "excites," and "Renown" and "Crown" tie ideas together, so the form seems to confirm that these qualities belong together in Alinda. The light, singable regularity suits the label "A SONG," and it keeps a poem full of abstractions from becoming heavy.
That reliance on abstraction is also its limit. Alinda never gets a face, a voice or a gesture. She is made of capitalised qualities, Form, Mind, Estate, Vertue, and she is more an example than a person. The poem says so itself: she is a "high Example." The compliment works as a public portrait, an ideal held up for the "ambitious Eye" to study.
The song deserves attention because it handles a conventional occasion, a compliment to a titled lady, with real intelligence. It borrows the language of love poetry, with its weapons, wounds and adoration, and uses it to say that the highest beauty is the kind that does no harm. It also treats rank and beauty as duties to be managed rather than prizes to be enjoyed. Few flattering poems make their subject's restraint the main source of her glamour.