Love & Passion Quote by Richard Savage

Savage lands the compliment-shaped insult that 18th-century verse loved best: a couplet that sounds like a breezy diagnosis and functions like a verdict. Addressing “Polly” (a stock pastoral name, half sweetheart and half prop), he turns a single woman into a stand-in for “your sex,” then reduces that sex to a cocktail of unreliability: a pinch of “truth,” a larger pour of “fiction,” a dash of “thought,” and a flood of “whim.” The rhythm does the dirty work. Each phrase is balanced, almost reasonable, until the final clause snaps shut: “all a contradiction.” It’s not an observation, it’s a trapdoor.

The intent is disciplinary as much as descriptive. By framing women as internally inconsistent, Savage gives male judgment a permanent alibi: if she disagrees, that’s “contradiction”; if she agrees, that’s “whim.” The couplet’s neat symmetry mimics rational order while arguing that women are the opposite of it. That tension is the subtext: the speaker performs composure to claim authority over someone he insists cannot possess it.

Context sharpens the edge. Savage is writing in a culture that prized “wit” as social weaponry and treated gender as material for epigrammatic certainty. The line borrows the Enlightenment’s appetite for classification but uses it to stabilize old hierarchies: man as thinker, woman as a riddle men get to solve, mock, and manage. It “works” because it’s quotable, rhythmic, and cruelly efficient - a misogynistic meme before memes, built to travel farther than any actual Polly ever could.