Anne Killigrew's reply to a lord begins with a yawn. Her Muse has been lying in "heavy slumbers," indulging "Sloth" and "soft Ease," until a set of verses signed "Cleanor" drags her from bed and "constrains" her to tune the "neglected Lyre." The title explains the occasion: Lord Colrane has sent compliments under a pen-name, and she answers in the same polite fiction. She also does something clever with the form. She never thanks him directly. She stages a small drama inside a poet's head and lets the Muse do the talking.
The Muse wakes "Confus'd," ponders, then rereads the lines "in her Thought." Her astonishment comes out as a doubled question, "And can it be? she said, and can it be?", which rhymes with "see" and so sounds like someone rubbing her eyes. The surprise is that a poet should turn up "'mong the Great Ones." What follows is a sharp piece of social criticism. The nobility spend their time on "dang'rous Politicks, and formal Pride, / Destructive Vice, expensive Vanity," a list that grows heavier with each noun. Then comes a sly flourish: "In worse Ways yet, if Worse there any be." The grammar pretends to doubt that anything worse exists while strongly suggesting it does. The arts are left to "Inferiours," and their "Retainers" become the "Men of Parts," meaning the talented. Cleanor stands out because he is a "Noble Born" with a "no less Noble Mind," a man who does not lean on ancestors but is "in Merit, as in Title, high." That last line balances Merit and Title on a single scale, as if asking whether the two ought to match. The compliment works by contrast, so it flatters one man while quietly insulting his whole class.
The third movement turns on the Muse herself. She is now "The Severe Goddess," yet she is "too much pleas'd, alas, with her own Praise." The speaker steps in and tells her to "cease to give place" to "vain Pride." The warning has been prepared from the start. In the opening lines the Muse was "fancying little worthy her employ," which is a kind of pride dressed up as idleness. Her sleep and her vanity turn out to be related. To deflate her, the speaker reaches for Virgil, whose "immortal Numbers" once honoured "A Smother'd Gnat." The enjambment drops the gnat onto the next line like a punchline. The point follows: undeserved applause reveals only "the Praisers worth." A compliment, on this view, is a portrait of the person who gives it.
The closing lines go further. Praise is often "for Instruction only sent," meant "To praise men to Amendment." The last couplet tells the Muse to take such verses "for Example, not Encomium." The plain word "Example" sits against the grand Latinate "Encomium," so the ending feels like a deliberate shrug at ceremony. It is also ambiguous, and that is part of its interest. Cleanor's praise is a model for her to live up to. But her own praise of him in the second section did the same job, holding up an ideal of the noble who is also a poet in the hope that he will stay that way. The poem may be modest and teaching at once.
Formally, it is written in iambic pentameter couplets, with the neat click of rhyme (slumbers/lay, devide/Pride, place/grace) that makes a line like "Nor that you should believ't, is't always meant" sound like a proverb. The verse paragraphs run twelve, ten and twelve lines, which gives a frame of waking, judging and self-correcting. The capitalised nouns and the elisions ("I'th'Noble Born") belong to the period's printed style.
The poem is significant because it turns a social courtesy into a small essay on how to receive praise. It values "Merit" over "Title," and its speaker, through her Muse, acts as judge of both nobility and compliment. She accepts the honour without grovelling and without simply returning flattery for flattery.