Most love poems promise that suffering will one day be repaid. Suckling's speaker is not so sure, so he sends his imagination down to the underworld to ask for a report. He wishes for "some honest lover's ghost" to return as a "kind unbodied post", a messenger made of air, and settle one question. In the afterlife, who wears the "noble chaplets", the garlands of honour? Is it the lovers who bore their mistress' scorn, or those who were "used kindly"? He fears the answer will not be the comforting one.
The poem is an argument disguised as a daydream. Stanzas two and four both open with "For", as if he were building a case. Loving alone, he says, "will not suffice, / Unless we also have been wise / And have our loves enjoyed". "Wise" is a sly choice, since wisdom here means getting what you wanted, and "enjoyed" is frank about what that was. Then comes a comic picture: "What posture can we think him in" who leaves this world unloved and arrives where "each sits by his own"? It looks like a dinner party where everyone else came in couples. Elysium, supposedly paradise, turns into torment, because he would still have to see his mistress "Circled in other's arms". The word sets one circle against another, the garland he might win against the embrace he has lost.
The fourth stanza brings in examples. Sophonisba, and Philoclea with her Pirocles, are the poem's models of posthumous couples. Philoclea, Pyrocles (spelled Pirocles here) and Amphialus are names from Sir Philip Sidney's romance *Arcadia*, where Amphialus is the unsuccessful rival. The point is a cruel twist on justice. "The judges all are just," so each woman goes to "his whom she held dear, / Not his who loved her here." Justice normally consoles the wronged, but here it delivers the bad news. The word "dear" has shifted meaning since stanza two, where suffering is made "dear" in the sense of precious. By now it just means beloved.
Formally, the title promises a sonnet, yet this is six seven-line stanzas, not fourteen lines. Each stanza runs through rhyming couplets (*ghost/post*, *below/know*, *wear/bear*) and then ends on a seventh line that has no partner: "kindly", "enjoyed", "arms", "Amphialus". The short lines cut against the longer ones, and the pattern feels like someone thinking aloud and then stopping short. The last stanza breaks the habit. "Here" in its final line finally rhymes with "were" and the earlier "here", so the loose end is tied just as the speaker makes up his mind.
That word "here" is the poem's hinge. It appears as "whatsoe'er they tell us here", "unloved" here, "loved her here", "martyrs here", and last of all in "Give me the woman here!" Set against "there", "thither" and "the shades below", it turns the whole poem into a choice between a promised later and an actual now. The afterlife he imagines is pagan, with shades, Elysium and "ye kinder gods", so he can haggle with it half-seriously. Even the lovers' reward shrinks under his eye to "some bays, perchance, or myrtle bough", and he sounds like a gambler asking about the odds: "if that be the only odds, / (As who can tell?)".
That brisk, worldly voice is where the poem's significance lies. The tradition of the faithful, suffering lover, a "noble martyr" for love, is treated as a bad bargain. Suckling does not mock the lovers cruelly, and he never claims to know what lies beyond death. He only says that a leaf on the brow is poor payment for losing her. The closing line drops the learned names and the long, balanced sentences for plain monosyllables, and it lands like a shout in a quiet room. It is selfish, but it is honest, and after so much talk of "honest" ghosts it may be the only honest answer the poem gets.