Many poets of the early modern period contemplated captivity. In the poems below, a female poet writes on friendship and captivity, and a male poet on love and captivity.

Katherine Philips is a mid seventeenth-century poet who wrote frequently about female friendship. Several of her poems use the common motif of retirement, a political stance some Royalists used to valorize retreat during a period when Parliamentarians were in power. In the poem below, she celebrates her friendship with Anne Owen, to whom she gave the sobriquet Lucasia. Philips likens their bond to something miraculous which is in opposition to the “dull angry world” (l. 4). Unlike Pulter, who, in her poem “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57) laments her confinement at her country estate and longs for freedom, Philips here celebrates the bonds of friendship as a desirable captivity and depicts freedom as a paradoxical banishment (ll. 16-18). Pulter’s isolation is a terrible imprisonment, while Philips’s friendship is a joyful bondage.

One of the best known Royalist poems from the civil war period is Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, From Prison.” Whether or not he actually wrote it from prison, Lovelace makes extensive use of imagery to contrast the speaker’s actual restraint with his inner freedom, particularly in relation to his bond with his beloved. Unlike in Pulter’s poem “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57), imprisonment for this male royalist poet is almost irrelevant, since he claims he is actually more free than gods, fish, and winds.