Fuscara, or the Bee Errant.
Nature's confectioner, the bee
(Whose suckets are moist alchemy,
The still of his refining mould
Minting the garden into gold),
Having rifled all the fields
Of what dainties Flora yields,
Ambitious now to take excise
Of a more fragrant paradise,
At my Fuscara's sleeve arrived
10Where all delicious sweets are hived.
The airy freebooter distrains
First on the violets of her veins,
Whose tincture, could it be more pure,
His ravenous kiss had made it bluer.
Here did he sit and essence quaff
Till her coy pulse had beat him off;
That pulse which he that feels may know
Whether the world 's long-lived or no.
The next he preys on is her palm,
20That alm'ner of transpiring balm;
So soft, 'tis air but once removed;
Tender as 'twere a jelly gloved.
Here, while his canting drone-pipe scanned
The mystic figures of her hand,
He tipples palmistry and dines
On all her fortune-telling lines.
He bathes in bliss and finds no odds
Betwixt her nectar and the gods',
He perches now upon her wrist,
30A proper hawk for such a fist,
Making that flesh his bill of fare
Which hungry cannibals would spare;
Where lilies in a lovely brown
Inoculate carnation.
He argent skin with or so streamed
As if the milky way were creamed.
From hence he to the woodbine bends
That quivers at her fingers' ends,
That runs division on the tree
40Like a thick-branching pedigree.
So 'tis not her the bee devours,
It is a pretty maze of flowers;
It is the rose that bleeds, when he
Nibbles his nice phlebotomy.
About her finger he doth cling
I' th' fashion of a wedding-ring,
And bids his comrades of the swarm
Crawl as a bracelet 'bout her arm.
Thus when the hovering publican
50Had sucked the toll of all her span,
Tuning his draughts with drowsy hums
As Danes carouse by kettle-drums,
It was decreed, that posie gleaned,
The small familiar should be weaned.
At this the errant's courage quails;
Yet aided by his native sails
The bold Columbus still designs
To find her undiscovered mines.
To th' Indies of her arm he flies,
60Fraught both with east and western prize;
Which when he had in vain essayed,
Armed like a dapper lancepresade
With Spanish pike, he broached a pore
And so both made and healed the sore:
For as in gummy trees there 's found
A salve to issue at the wound,
Of this her breach the like was true:
Hence trickled out a balsam, too.
But oh, what wasp was 't that could prove
70Ravaillac to my Queen of Love!
The King of Bees now 's jealous grown
Lest her beams should melt his throne,
And finding that his tribute slacks,
His burgesses and state of wax
Turned to a hospital, the combs
Built rank-and-file like beadsmen's rooms,
And what they bleed but tart and sour
Matched with my Danae's golden shower,
Live-honey all,—the envious elf
80Stung her, 'cause sweeter than himself.
Sweetness and she are so allied
The bee committed parricide.
Fuscara. (1651.) Cleveland's most famous poem of the amatory, as The Rebel Scot is of the political, kind. In 1677 and since it has been set in the forefront of his Poems, and Johnson draws specially on it for his famous diatribe against the metaphysicals in the 'Life of Cowley'. It seems to me inferior both to The Muses' Festival and to The Antiplatonic, and, as was said in the Introduction, it betrays, to me, something of an intention to fool the lovers of a fashionable style to the top of their bent. But it has extremely pretty things in it; and Mr. Addison, who denounced and scorned 'false wit', never 'fair-sexed it' in half so poetical a manner.
2 'Suckets' or 'succades' should need interpretation to no reader of Robinson Crusoe: and no one who has not read Robinson Crusoe deserves to be taken into consideration.
13 tincture] Said to be used here in an alchemical sense for 'gold'. But the plain meaning is much better.
18 Although the sense is not quite the same as, it is much akin to, that of Browning's question—
'Who knows but the world may end to night?'
20 Cleveland of course uses the correct and not the modern and blundering sense of 'transpire'.
22 This 'jelly gloved' is not like 'mobled queen' or 'calcining flame'.
25-6 1653 and its group have a queer misprint (carried out so as to rhyme, but hardly possible as a true reading) of 'dives' and 'lives'. If they had had 'In' instead of 'On' it would have been on the (metaphysical) cards, especially with 'bathes' following.
28 1653, less well, 'the nectar'.
30 Neat, i' faith!
33 'a lovely brown' as being Fuscara.
35 Here Cleveland dares his 'ill armoury again'; v. sup., [p. 25]. 'He' 1651, 1653: 'Her' 1677.
48 as] 1677, unnecessarily, 'like'. Some (baddish) editions 'on a bracelet'.
52 Hardly necessary to notice as another of Cleveland's Shakespearian touches.
62 The correcter form is 'lancepesade'.
70 'Ratillias' 1651: 'Ratilias' 1653: corrected in 1677.
71 1677, dropping the verb from 'now's', improves the sense very much.
*An Elegy upon Doctor Chad[d]erton, the first Master
of Emanuel College in Cambridge, being above
an hundred years old when he died.
(Occasioned by his long-deferred funeral.)
Pardon, dear Saint, that we so late
With lazy sighs bemoan thy fate,
And with an after-shower of verse
And tears, we thus bedew thy hearse.
Till now, alas! we did not weep,
Because we thought thou didst but sleep.
Thou liv'dst so long we did not know
Whether thou couldst now die or no.
We looked still when thou shouldst arise
10And ope the casements of thine eyes.
Thy feet, which have been used so long
To walk, we thought, must still go on.
Thine ears, after a hundred year,
Might now plead custom for to hear.
Upon thy head that reverend snow
Did dwell some fifty years ago:
And then thy cheeks did seem to have
The sad resemblance of a grave.
Wert thou e'er young? For truth I hold
20And do believe thou wert born old.
There 's none alive, I'm sure, can say
They knew thee young, but always grey.
And dost thou now, venerable oak,
Decline at Death's unhappy stroke?
Tell me, dear son, why didst thou die
And leave 's to write an elegy?
We're young, alas! and know thee not.
Send up old Abram and grave Lot.
Let them write thy Epitaph and tell
30The world thy worth; they kenned thee well.
When they were boys, they heard thee preach
And thought an angel did them teach.
Awake them then: and let them come
And score thy virtues on thy tomb,
That we at those may wonder more
Than at thy many years before.
An Elegy, &c. This and the following piece are among the disputed poems, but as they occur in 1653 I give them, with warning and asterisked. The D.N.B. allows (with a ?) 104 years (1536?-1640) to Chadderton. As the first Master of the House of pure Emmanuel he might be supposed unlikely to extract a tear from Cleveland. But he had resigned his Mastership nearly twenty years before his death, and that death occurred before the troubles became insanabile vulnus. There is nothing to require special annotation in it, or indeed in either, though in Doctor Chadderton, l. 23, one may safely guess that either 'thou' or 'now' is an intrusion; in l. 25 of the same that 'son' should be 'sir', 'sire', 'saint', &c.; and in l. 29 that 'th' Epitaph' is likelier.
*Mary's Spikenard.
Shall I presume,
Without perfume,
My Christ to meet
That is all sweet?
No! I'll make most pleasant posies,
Catch the breath of new-blown roses,
Top the pretty merry flowers,
Which laugh in the fairest bowers,
Whose sweetness Heaven likes so well,
10It stoops each morn to take a smell.
Then I'll fetch from the Phœnix' nest
The richest spices and the best,
Precious ointments I will make;
Holy Myrrh and aloes take,
Yea, costly Spikenard in whose smell
The sweetness of all odours dwell.
I'll get a box to keep it in,
Pure as his alabaster skin:
And then to him I'll nimbly fly
20Before one sickly minute die.
This box I'll break, and on his head
This precious ointment will I spread,
Till ev'ry lock and ev'ry hair
For sweetness with his breath compare:
But sure the odour of his skin
Smells sweeter than the spice I bring.
Then with bended knee I'll greet
His holy and belovéd feet;
I'll wash them with a weeping eye,
30And then my lips shall kiss them dry;
Or for a towel he shall have
My hair—such flax as nature gave.
But if my wanton locks be bold,
And on Thy sacred feet take hold,
And curl themselves about, as though
They were loath to let thee go,
O chide them not, and bid away,
For then for grief they will grow grey.
Mary's Spikenard (1652) of course suggests Crashaw; and yet when one reads it the thought must surely occur, 'How differently Crashaw would have done it!' I do not think either is Cleveland's, though the odd string of unrelated conceits in the Chadderton piece is not unlike him. In the other there is nothing like his usual style; but it is very pretty, and I will not say he could not have done it as an exception. But in that case it is a pity he did not make it a rule.
To Julia to expedite her Promise.
Since 'tis my doom, Love's undershrieve,
Why this reprieve?
Why doth my she-advowson fly
Incumbency?
Panting expectance makes us prove
The antics of benighted love,
And withered mates when wedlock joins,
They're Hymen's monkeys, which he ties by th' loins
To play, alas! but at rebated foins.
10To sell thyself dost thou intend
By candle end,
And hold the contract thus in doubt,
Life's taper out?
Think but how soon the market fails;
Your sex lives faster than the males;
As if, to measure age's span,
The sober Julian were th' account of man,
Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian.
Now since you bear a date so short,
20Live double for 't.
How can thy fortress ever stand
If 't be not manned?
The siege so gains upon the place
Thou'lt find the trenches in thy face.
Pity thyself then if not me,
And hold not out, lest like Ostend thou be
Nothing but rubbish at delivery.
The candidates of Peter's chair
Must plead grey hair,
30And use the simony of a cough
To help them off.
But when I woo, thus old and spent,
I'll wed by will and testament.
No, let us love while crisped and curled;
The greatest honours, on the agéd hurled,
Are but gay furloughs for another world.
To-morrow what thou tenderest me
Is legacy.
Not one of all those ravenous hours
40But thee devours.
And though thou still recruited be,
Like Pelops, with soft ivory,
Though thou consume but to renew,
Yet Love as lord doth claim a heriot due;
That 's the best quick thing I can find of you.
I feel thou art consenting ripe
By that soft gripe,
And those regealing crystal spheres.
I hold thy tears
50Pledges of more distilling sweets,
The bath that ushers in the sheets.
Else pious Julia, angel-wise,
Moves the Bethesda of her trickling eyes
To cure the spital world of maladies.
To Julia, &c. Johnson singled out the opening verse of this as a special example of 'bringing remote ideas together'.
1 'Shrieve' of course = 'Sheriff'.
3-4 'advowson' (again of course, but these things get curiously mistaken nowadays) = 'right of presenting to or enjoying a benefice'. 'Incumbency' = 'the actual occupation or enjoyment'. Cf. Square-Cap, ll. 37-8.
9 rebated] The opposite of 'unbated' in Hamlet—with the button on.
11 Mr. Pepys on November 6, 1660, watched this process (which was specially used in ship-selling) for the first time and with interest. 'candle' 1653: 'candle's' 1677.
17-18 Not a very happy 'conceiting' of the fact that in a millennium and a half the Julian reckoning had got ten days behindhand.
27 The siege of Ostend (1601-4) lasted three years and seventy-seven days.
34 Did a far greater Cambridge poet think of this in writing
'When the locks are crisp and curl'd?'
(The Vision of Sin.)
48 regealing] Cleveland seems to use this unusual word in the sense of 'unfreezing'.
51 1677 spoils sense and verse alike by beginning the line with 'Than'. The 'tears' are the 'bath'.