ABSTRACT
This poem by an unknown contributor is closely patterned on one by John Suckling, a trial of love’s ambition. At first sight the debts to Suckling seem straightforward, as does the imitation’s message: that anarchy encourages more of the same. Suckling’s poem looks linear, a series of lover’s tests, implying an arrival at the ideal state of true love. The structure of the ‘Ode to a Jacobin’ mirrors the original exactly, and simply substitutes revolutionary urges for Suckling’s romantic ones. But both source and imitation are more interesting. Suckling’s final stanza denies the assumed conclusion. True love demands, it turns out, endless renewal: Thou must begin again, and love anew’. Whoever wrote this imitation was sensitive to the source, and applications. Sympathetic accounts of the Revolution assume its history to be linear, a turbulent passage towards an ideal State. This poem insists on the circularity of the term revolution. Lawbreaking invites lawbreaking; Jacobinism is seen as a wheel of violence, going nowhere.
