Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Gay

Love here is staged as a rigged game, and John Gay writes the rules with a comedian’s knife. The lines move like a neat little dance of pursuit and retreat: “grow fond” and you’re punished; “fly them” and you’re rewarded, briefly. It’s not just a complaint about fickle lovers. It’s a miniature satire of courtship as a marketplace where desire spikes at scarcity and collapses at possession. The final sting - “leave us when they’ve won us” - turns romance into conquest, exposing how quickly “winning” curdles into boredom once the thrill of chase is gone.

Gay’s intent is pointedly gendered: he frames “woman” as the one forced to strategize inside a system calibrated for male vanity. The rhetorical question (“What then... can woman do?”) isn’t looking for advice; it’s an indictment of limited agency. No matter which lever she pulls - openness or distance - the outcome is loss. That’s the subtext: emotional sincerity is treated as a mistake, while self-protection becomes the only rational posture. The poem’s cynicism isn’t nihilistic; it’s diagnostic.

Context matters. In early 18th-century London, Gay thrived on skewering polite society’s hypocrisies, and this fits neatly with the era’s obsession with reputation, flirtation, and social leverage. Courtship, especially for women, carried real stakes: security, status, survival. Gay compresses that pressure into a singable paradox, the kind that lands because it feels like a joke you laugh at, then recognize as policy.