well in particular." The poem adopts the view that the chivalric ideal of love represents the sublimation of desire into duty, and that this personal model of devoted love stands for the political ideal of aristocratic government by the finest and best educated of persons in society, whose sensibilities are refined by courtly life and culture. Victoria Kahn argues that the politics of love is central to Davenant's argument "that poetry could instill political obedience by inspiring the reader with love. Romance was not simply a powerful generic influence on Gondibert, it was also Davenant's model for the poet's relation to the reader." Influence The poem introduced the "Gondibert stanza", a decasyllabic quatrain in pentameters rhyming abab. It was adopted by Waller in A panegyrick to my Lord Protector (1655) and by John Dryden in Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell and Annus Mirabilis. John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester uses it satirically in The Disabled Debauchee. According to the Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature "Dryden revives this measure to make his peace with the 1650s and advertise his bid to continue Davenant's Laureate project, but it would soon be wickedly parodied in Rochester's 'Disabled Debauchee'." Andrew Marvell's poem Upon Appleton House is often interpreted as a republican reply to the royalist message of Gondibert, which contrasts the fantasy world of Davenant's poem with the real domestic haven created by the retired Parliamentarian commander Thomas Fairfax. William Thompson's play Gondibert And Birtha: A Tragedy (1751) was based on the poem. Alexander Chalmers wrote of the play that "although it is not without individual passages of poetical beauty, it has not dramatic form and consistency to entitle it to higher praise." Hannah Cowley's play Albina (1779) is much more loosely derived from it. The character of Sir Gondibert also made a brief reappearance in English literature in "Calidore: A Fragment," an early unfinished poem by John Keats heavily influenced by Edmund Spenser. In the "Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors" chapter of Walden, American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau tells a story of once being interrupted of reading Davenant's "Gondibert" by a fire that broke out in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. He had been working his way through Alexander Chalmers' 21-volume set, The Works of the English Poets, From Chaucer to Cowper, which he checked out of the Harvard College library. The text of "Gondibert" appears