Few songs about love sound as much like a courtroom speech as this one. The title tells us it comes from a play, Dryden's *Marriage-A-La-Mode*, and the French phrase suggests marriage "in the fashion", so we are in a world of worldly, sophisticated attitudes. Because the song is sung by a character, it is safest to treat the speaker's views as a performance rather than Dryden's confession. The argument itself is clear. A marriage vow was made out of pleasure, so when pleasure dies the vow has no more claim on anyone. The second stanza extends the idea: if each partner takes pleasure elsewhere, neither has a right to complain.
The first stanza builds its case almost like a proof. The opening question, "Why should a foolish marriage vow... Oblige us to each other now," already carries its verdict in the word "foolish", and "long ago" shrinks the promise into something dusty and distant. Then comes the key move in the last line: "'Twas pleasure first made it an oath." The speaker treats the vow as an effect with a single cause, so when the cause disappears, so does the effect. The vocabulary of feeling is oddly worn out and used up. Passion is "decayed", like fruit or old timber, and the repeated "we loved, and we loved, as long as we could" sounds like two people trudging until they run out of road. The best phrase is "our love was loved out in us both", which makes love a fuel or a supply that has simply been consumed. Nobody is blamed, and that is the point. The speaker makes the ending sound like natural exhaustion rather than betrayal.
The form helps this tone. The first four lines of each stanza alternate longer and shorter lines in the pattern of a ballad, with a neat ABAB rhyme (*vow/now*, *made/decayed*). It sounds orderly and reasonable. Then the lines stretch and start to gallop, with a triple-beat bounce that feels closer to a dance tune. Rhyme loosens too. In the first stanza, *both* and *oath* pair up at the line ends, while line 7 rhymes inside itself: "dead... fled". The second stanza does something similar with "gain... pain". The effect is a breezy confidence, as if the conclusion were too obvious to need heavy argument. The jaunty rhythm makes a rather cold idea easy to hum.
The second stanza turns to a third person, and the language becomes slyly commercial and legal. "Pleasures for a friend" is a polite euphemism, and "farther love in store" treats affection like goods in a warehouse. "What wrong has he" and "bar him" borrow the vocabulary of rights and trespass. Jealousy is dismissed as "a madness", a clever trick that turns a painful emotion into an irrational symptom. The closing line is built on balance: "When neither can hinder the other." *Another* and *other* rhyme in the last two lines, and the symmetry sounds fair, even democratic. Both partners get the same freedom.
What makes the poem worth studying is how persuasive and how unsettling it is at once. Its logic is tidy, and its wit makes marriage seem like a contract that has simply expired. Yet read closely, the speaker's argument depends on a very narrow idea of what a vow is. Nothing is said about loyalty, kindness, trust, or what the promise meant beyond pleasure. The partner is also spoken about ("he") rather than spoken to, so he never gets to answer. The song works as a piece of dramatic characterisation, letting us hear a voice that is charming, self-assured and perhaps a little selfish. The poem invites readers to enjoy the argument and then to push back against it, which is a good sign that it is doing its job.