Nancy Vickers argues that in some blazons, such as Shakespeare’s anti-blazon “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun,” the speaker “by introducing the concept of merchandising into the economy of description, … transforms the direct line one would expect to unite lover and beloved into a triangle. Here a lyric ‘I’ does not privately speak to a lyric ‘you’ but rather, by ‘publishing his love,’ interjects a third term: ‘I’ speaks ‘you’ to an audience that, it is hoped, will in turn purchase ‘you.’ The relationship so constructed involves an active buyer, an active seller, and a passive object for sale” (Nancy J. Vickers, “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Harman [Methuen, 1985), pp. 95-115). The texts presented here draw attention to the triangle in Pulter’s poem, in which the speaker joins the lover and beloved, brokering a relationship between them. The speaker might try to join or part the lovers. In Behn’s “The Invitation,” the speaker, who has diverted Damon’s arrows from his beloved Sylvia, because she already loved another swain, steps in as the alternative, inviting Damon to “Think me as fair and young as she.”

Ballads: Middle and late seventeenth-century ballads, which require singers to inhabit various positions and take up different voices, offer many examples of satirical blazons or anti-blazons, in which the speaker describes his beloved to another, as in “A peerelesse Paragon, / OR, / Few so chast, so beautious or so faire, / for with my love I think none can compare” (c. 1633-1669); and of poems in which one man offers advice to another about women, such as “The Country Lass for me” (c. 1672-96) and “The Old Man’s Advice to Bachelors, about the choice of their wives” (c. 1662-92).