His facility in melodious poetic expression is evident in this stanza from The Litany, one of the poems in Noble Numbers, as the collection of his religious verse is called:—
"When the passing-bell doth toll
And the furies in a shoal
Come to fright a parting soul,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me."
The lyric, Disdain Returned, of the courtier, Thomas Carew, shows both a customary type of subject and the serious application often given:—
"He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from starlike eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,
As old time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away."
Carew could write with facility on the subjects in vogue at court, but when he ventures afield in nature poetry, he makes the cuckoo hibernate! In his poem The Spring, he says:—
"…wakes in hollow tree
The drowsy Cuckoo and the Humble-bee."
In these lines from his poem Constancy, Sir John Suckling shows that he is a typical Cavalier love poet:—
"Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather."
From Richard Lovelace we have these exquisite lines written in prison:—
"Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage."