Lines Written In Letters Of An Italian Nun And An English Gentleman - Analysis

Two voices, one argument about belief

This poem stages a neat little duel: a warning from a woman who claims to know men’s tricks, and a man’s reply that rebrands those tricks as sincerity. The nun’s four lines offer the central suspicion—charm is an instrument designed to produce tears: the gentleman’s fleeting arts will betray the simpler hearts who believe, while he will smile at their trust. The answering letter tries to confiscate that suspicion by insisting that deception is mostly in the woman’s mind: the flattering arts are phantoms, not practices.

The nun’s cold clarity: charm as cruelty

The nun speaks with a kind of compressed certainty, as if she has already watched this pattern play out. Her tone is protective but severe: Away, away is not flirtation; it’s expulsion. What makes her warning bite is the emotional asymmetry she predicts—he gets the private reward of amusement (you will smile), while the victims pay publicly and bodily (they shall weep). Even the adjective fleeting matters: the arts are temporary and portable, used and discarded, which implies the women are not seen as people so much as occasions for performance.

The gentleman’s counterspell: calling vanity “truth”

The reply answers accusation with reassurance, and reassurance with a subtle shift in blame. He begins by flattering the addressee as a Dear, simple girl, a phrase that pretends tenderness while quietly claiming superior knowledge. Then he denies the category of manipulation altogether: the arts Exist but in imagination. Yet in the very act of denying artifice, he lays on thick description—witching grace, perfect form, lovely face—as if the sheer abundance of praise can substitute for proof of honest intention. His claim, He never wishes to deceive thee, is strikingly absolute; it asks to be believed on the strength of his emotional reaction, not his behavior.

The mirror: where “evidence” becomes self-enchantment

The poem’s most revealing image is the polish’d mirror. He tells her to look once and she’ll descry her own elegance, turning the case into a closed loop: your beauty verifies my praise, and my praise is therefore not flattery. But the mirror is also a trapdoor into self-surveillance. Instead of addressing the nun’s moral charge—men smiling while women weep—he relocates the whole issue to appearance, where he can win: if beauty is obvious, then the speaker can pose as merely candid, doing his duty by saying so.

A key tension: sincerity that sounds like technique

The poem’s tension is that the gentleman’s denial of manipulation uses the very methods the nun fears. He calls her simple while asking for trust; he labels himself candid while carefully arranging compliments; he reframes pursuit as obligation: only does his duty. Even his final line—It is not flattery, ’tis truth—reads like a practiced closing argument. The nun worries about deceiving; he avoids that word’s moral weight by making the whole scene about correct perception. If she doubts him, it becomes not caution but blindness.

The sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If the gentleman is right and praise is merely truth, why does he need to argue so hard, and why does his “truth” depend so much on her looking in a mirror? The poem quietly suggests that the most effective fleeting arts may be the ones that persuade someone to cooperate in their own convincing.