“To Althea, From Prison” was written by Richard Lovelace in the duration one of his imprisonments. It is essentially about mind over matter and true freedom. The speaker says that even though he is in prison, he is freer than just about everybody and everything else. The human mind will always be free, just as long as you allow it to be and Richard Lovelace captured this perfectly through his careful precision in diction, syntax, and tone of this poem. In this poem, the speaker uses neutral diction like “fettered” and “shall” which are words we would not normally use to address a friend. Flowery diction is utilized throughout the entire poem. He shows the neutral and flowery words in phrases such as, “Our careless heads with roses bound, Our hearts with loyal flames; When thirsty grief in wine we steep, When healths and draughts go free.” He especially uses very sweet and tender type words to describe his beloved, Althea. He makes it seem like he finds comfort with her and that she is sweet and loving as he says, “my divine Althea” and, “When I lie tangled in her hair And fetter'd to her eye..” The language is also lyrical. It seems to flow like the choruses and bridges…show more content… The sentences of the poem are mostly complex. The sentence lengths were not short and choppy nor long and dragged on. There were no rhetorical questions and no fragments. All of the sentences in this poem were much alike. They all begin with a subject that he is going to address and describes how this goes along with his freedom. He then says at the end of every stanza, “Know no such liberty.” This final statement in each stanza is the only repetition in this poem. The poem’s clean framework is what helps make it such an easy read how they are put into stanzas. I believe that the very standard, basic, put together framework of the poem can go along with the confined sense of a