Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Daniel

Love here isn’t a glow or a moral achievement; it’s a diagnosis. Samuel Daniel frames desire as a malady that thrives on the very interventions meant to cure it, and that reversal is the engine of the stanza. “All remedies refusing” turns the standard Renaissance toolkit (reason, distance, virtue, prayer) into useless bedside manner. The line doesn’t just complain about heartbreak; it suggests love is structurally anti-rational, a condition that feeds on opposition.

Then Daniel switches metaphors and tightens the trap: love is a “plant” that responds perversely to care. “With most cutting grows” borrows the gardener’s logic of pruning, but weaponizes it: restraint, rejection, or even self-denial doesn’t reduce the feeling, it stimulates it. That’s a sharp psychological insight dressed as horticulture. “Most barren with best using” lands with a colder irony. In the courtly-love tradition, fulfillment is supposed to be the prize; Daniel implies consummation can empty love out, leaving it unproductive, a plant that stops flowering once it’s handled properly.

Context matters: Daniel is writing in a late-Elizabethan culture steeped in Petrarchan love poetry, where the beloved is elevated, the lover suffers, and longing becomes a kind of social performance. This quatrain both participates in that fashion and punctures it. The subtext is almost skeptical: desire isn’t ennobling, it’s self-sustaining. Deny it and it intensifies; satisfy it and it collapses. Either way, love wins by refusing to behave like a sensible emotion.