Love, in this poem, is a god with a poor success rate. He tells the speaker to hope, the speaker obeys, and Phyllis stays "unkind". So Love changes his advice: "you may e'en despair," he says, since "in vain I strive to change her mind." The god of love shrugging at the limits of his own power is an unexpected opening, and it sets the tone for a poem that sounds like a lament but works more like a cross-examination. John Wilmot, the Restoration court wit better known as the Earl of Rochester, takes the stock figure of the rejected lover and gives him a case to argue.
The villain of that case is Honour. In the second stanza he has "got in" and "keeps her heart", as if he had broken into a house. Love is helpless against him, yet claims he would win in a fair fight: "Durst he but venture once abroad," Love would "show myself the mightier God." The rhyme of "abroad" with "God" lands the boast, though the conditional "durst" admits that no such fight will happen. The speaker then insults the rival. Honour "domineers" and is "huffing", a word for bluster, and by the third stanza he is a "hector", a swaggering bully. Like many bullies he is brave only at home, ruling "in breasts alone where he has place", and he "dares not show his face" before "true generous Love". Honour is not a virtue here but a cowardly tyrant lodged in a woman's heart.
The form helps the argument along. Six quatrains in brisk four-beat lines, rhymed ABAB, give the poem a plain, spoken quality, like a man talking himself into a corner and then talking his way out. Most lines are end-stopped, so each carries a small verdict. The fifth stanza is the exception: "Whose tyrant does most cruel prove, / The difference is not hard to make" twists its syntax almost like a lawyer's clause. The speaker is weighing two sufferers and wants the scales to tip his way.
They do tip, through a neat reversal in stanza four. The speaker takes on the vocabulary of the Petrarchan lover, "languish and complain", and then undercuts it. He has "some pleasure in my pain"; Phyllis, "with all her pride", has none. Stanza five makes the claim religious: he falls "a sacrifice to Love", while she "lives a wretch for Honour's sake". A sacrifice at least has meaning, and a wretch has only her rule. The rejected man casts himself as a martyr and the woman who rejected him as the real victim, to be pitied for her own strictness.
Then comes the turn the title has been waiting for. "Consider real Honour then," the speaker says, and defines it twice. In men it is "noble confidence"; in women it is "mean, mistrustful shame." The pun on "confidence", which can mean boldness or trust, is the poem's sharpest move. Because it can mean trust, a woman's refusal can be redescribed as suspicion of the man asking. The adjectives do the rest: "noble" for him, "mean" for her. The poem ends by calling her virtue a vice.
The sleight of hand is easy to admire and just as easy to resist. Phyllis never speaks. Two male gods, Love and Honour, both "he", fight over her heart while she stays silent, and the speaker, who stands to gain from her choice, sets himself up as judge of what her honour really is. Judging by the poem's reasoning, it is less a confession of love than a seduction argument dressed as a complaint, and its self-pity is part of the tactic.
That makes it a good poem to read slowly. Its charm is its wit: the bullying "hector", the god who admits defeat, the tidy last couplet that reverses a moral standard. The poem also shows how persuasive language works. Capitalised abstractions, flattering contrasts and a confident rhythm can make a self-interested claim sound like common sense. The pleasure of the poem lies in enjoying the performance while noticing where the logic slips.