To the State of Love. Or the Senses' Festival.
I saw a vision yesternight,
Enough to sate a Seeker's sight;
I wished myself a Shaker there,
And her quick pants my trembling sphere.
It was a she so glittering bright,
You'd think her soul an Adamite;
A person of so rare a frame,
Her body might be lined with' same.
Beauty's chiefest maid of honour,
10You may break Lent with looking on her.
Not the fair Abbess of the skies,
With all her nunnery of eyes,
Can show me such a glorious prize!
And yet, because 'tis more renown
To make a shadow shine, she's brown;
A brown for which Heaven would disband
The galaxy, and stars be tanned;
Brown by reflection as her eye
Deals out the summer's livery.
20Old dormant windows must confess
Her beams; their glimmering spectacles,
Struck with the splendour of her face,
Do th' office of a burning-glass.
Now where such radiant lights have shown,
No wonder if her cheeks be grown
Sunburned, with lustre of her own.
My sight took pay, but (thank my charms!)
I now impale her in mine arms;
(Love's compasses confining you,
30Good angels, to a circle too.)
Is not the universe strait-laced
When I can clasp it in the waist?
My amorous folds about thee hurled,
With Drake I girdle in the world;
I hoop the firmament, and make
This, my embrace, the zodiac.
How would thy centre take my sense
When admiration doth commence
At the extreme circumference?
40Now to the melting kiss that sips
The jellied philtre of her lips;
So sweet there is no tongue can praise 't
Till transubstantiate with a taste.
Inspired like Mahomet from above
By th' billing of my heavenly dove,
Love prints his signets in her smacks,
Those ruddy drops of squeezing wax,
Which, wheresoever she imparts,
They're privy seals to take up hearts.
50Our mouths encountering at the sport,
My slippery soul had quit the fort,
But that she stopped the sally-port.
Next to these sweets, her lips dispense
(As twin conserves of eloquence)
The sweet perfume her breath affords,
Incorporating with her words.
No rosary this vot'ress needs—
Her very syllables are beads;
No sooner 'twixt those rubies born,
60But jewels are in ear-rings worn.
With what delight her speech doth enter;
It is a kiss o' th' second venter.
And I dissolve at what I hear,
As if another Rosamond were
Couched in the labyrinth of my ear.
Yet that 's but a preludious bliss,
Two souls pickeering in a kiss.
Embraces do but draw the line,
'Tis storming that must take her in.
70When bodies join and victory hovers
'Twixt the equal fluttering lovers,
This is the game; make stakes, my dear!
Hark, how the sprightly chanticleer
(That Baron Tell-clock of the night)
Sounds boutesel to Cupid's knight.
Then have at all, the pass is got,
For coming off, oh, name it not!
Who would not die upon the spot?
To the State of Love, &c. appeared first 1651. The stanzas are not divided in the early editions, but are so in 1677. Carew's Rapture may have given some suggestions, Apuleius and Lucretius also; but not much is required. The substance is shocking to pure prudery, no doubt; but, as observed in the introduction, there is perhaps more gusto in the execution than in Fuscara.
A copy of this poem, with many minor variants, is in Bodleian MS. Tanner 306, fol. 424: it has one noteworthy reading, 'took sey', i.e. 'say' or 'assay'—the hunting term—in l. 27.
2, 3 The use of capitals in the seventeenth century is so erratic that it is dangerous to base much on it. But both 'Seekers' and 'Shakers' (a variant of 'Quakers') were actually among the countless sects of the time, as well of course as 'Adamites'. 1651. 1653, 1654, and 1657 have 'tempt' for 1677 'sate'.
4 pants 1677: 'pulse' 1651, 1653, 1654, 1657.
10 'You'd break a Lent' 1651, 1653.
11-13 Benlowes's lines (v. sup. i. 356)—
The lady prioress of the cloistered sky, &c.—
are more poetic than these, but may be less original. Even that, however, is uncertain. Both poets, though Benlowes was a good deal the elder, were of St. John's, and must, even in other ways, have known each other: Theophila appeared a year after the edition in which this poem was first included. But the indebtedness may be the other way, or common to an earlier original, or non-existent.
19 Deals out] The earlier texts have 'Dazzle's', but 1677 seems here to have introduced the true reading found also in the MS. 'Deals out' is far more poetical: the eye clothes with its own reflection sky and stars, and earth.
20-3 The punctuation of all editions, including Mr. Berdan's, makes these lines either totally unintelligible, or very confused, by putting a stop at 'spectacles' and none at 'beams'. That adopted in the text makes it quite clear.
30 circle] 'compass' 1651, 1653, evidently wrong.
33 It is not impossible that Aphra Behn had these lines unconsciously in her head when she wrote her own finest passage. Unconsciously, for the drift is quite different; but 'hurled', 'amorous', and 'world' come close together in both.
34 1651, 1653 again 'compass' for 'girdle'.
37 'would', the reading of 1651, 1653, infinitely better than 'could', that of 1677.
45 In this pyramidally metaphysical passage Cleveland does not quite play the game. Mahomet's pigeon did not kiss him. But 'privy seals to take up hearts' is very dear to fancy, most delicate, and of liberal conceit. So also 'jewels are in ear-rings worn' below; where the game is played to its rigour, though the reader may not at first see it.
46 his] 'her' 1651, 1653; but it clearly should be 'his', which is in 1677.
53 1651, 1653 read 'Next to those sweets her lips dispense', nescio an melius.
61 her] 'our,' a variant of one edition (1665) is all wrong.
62 Mr. Berdan has strangely misinterpreted 'venter'. The phrase is quite a common one—'of the second marriage.' The first kiss comes of lip and lip, the second of lip and love.
67 pickeering] 'marauding', 'skirmishing in front of an army'.
70 For 'join' [jine] 1651, 1653 and others have 'whine'—suggesting the Latin gannitus frequent in such contexts. But 'join' must be right. Professor Gordon points out that the passage is a reminiscence of Donne, in his Extasie:
As 'twixt two equall Armies, Fate
Suspends uncertaine victorie,
Our soules (which to advance their state
Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.(13-16.)
This is contrasted with the bodily 'entergrafting' of l. 9, &c.
74 When 'prose and sense' came in they were very contemptuous of this Baron Tell-clock. But the image is complete, congruous, and capable of being championed.
75 'Boutesel' of course = 'boot and saddle', albeit 'boute' does not mean 'boot'.
The Hecatomb to his Mistress.
Be dumb, you beggars of the rhyming trade,
Geld your loose wits and let your Muse be spayed.
Charge not the parish with the bastard phrase
Of balm, elixir, both the Indias,
Of shrine, saint, sacrilege, and such as these
Expressions common as your mistresses.
Hence, you fantastic postillers in song.
My text defeats your art, ties Nature's tongue,
Scorns all her tinselled metaphors of pelf,
10Illustrated by nothing but herself.
As spiders travel by their bowels spun
Into a thread, and, when the race is run,
Wind up their journey in a living clew,
So is it with my poetry and you.
From your own essence must I first untwine,
Then twist again each panegyric line.
Reach then a soaring quill that I may write,
As with a Jacob's staff, to take her height.
Suppose an angel, darting through the air,
20Should there encounter a religious prayer
Mounting to Heaven, that Intelligence
Should for a Sunday-suit thy breath condense
Into a body.—Let me crack a string
In venturing higher; were the note I sing
Above Heaven's Ela, should I then decline,
And with a deep-mouthed gamut sound the line
From pole to pole, I could not reach her worth,
Nor find an epithet to set it forth.
Metals may blazon common beauties; she
30Makes pearls and planets humble heraldry.
As, then, a purer substance is defined
But by a heap of negatives combined,
Ask what a spirit is, you'll hear them cry
It hath no matter, no mortality:
So can I not define how sweet, how fair;
Only I say she 's not as others are.
For what perfections we to others grant,
It is her sole perfection to want.
All other forms seem in respect of thee
40The almanac's misshaped anatomy,
Where Aries head and face, Bull neck and throat,
The Scorpion gives the secrets, knees the Goat;
A brief of limbs foul as those beasts, or are
Their namesake signs in their strange character.
As the philosophers to every sense
Marry its object, yet with some dispense,
And grant them a polygamy with all,
And these their common sensibles they call:
So is 't with her who, stinted unto none,
50Unites all senses in each action.
The same beam heats and lights; to see her well
Is both to hear and feel, to taste and smell.
For, can you want a palate in your eyes,
When each of hers contains a double prize,
Venus's apple? Can your eyes want nose
When from each cheek buds forth a fragrant rose?
Or can your sight be deaf to such a quick
And well-tuned face, such moving rhetoric?
Doth not each look a flash of lightning feel
60Which spares the body's sheath, and melts the steel?
Thy soul must needs confess, or grant thy sense
Corrupted with the object's excellence.
Sweet magic, which can make five senses lie
Conjured within the circle of an eye!
In whom, since all the five are intermixed,
Oh now that Scaliger would prove his sixt!
Thou man of mouth, that canst not name a she
Unless all Nature pay a subsidy,
Whose language is a tax, whose musk-cat verse
70Voids nought but flowers, for thy Muse's hearse
Fitter than Celia's looks, who in a trice
Canst state the long disputed Paradise,
And (what Divines hunt with so cold a scent)
Canst in her bosom find it resident;
Now come aloft, come now, and breathe a vein,
And give some vent unto thy daring strain.
Say the astrologer who spells the stars,
In that fair alphabet reads peace and wars,
Mistakes his globe and in her brighter eye
80Interprets Heaven's physiognomy.
Call her the Metaphysics of her sex,
And say she tortures wits as quartans vex
Physicians; call her the square circle; say
She is the very rule of Algebra.
What e'er thou understand'st not, say 't of her,
For that 's the way to write her character.
Say this and more, and when thou hopest to raise
Thy fancy so as to inclose her praise—
Alas poor Gotham, with thy cuckoo-hedge!
90Hyperboles are here but sacrilege.
Then roll up, Muse, what thou hast ravelled out,
Some comments clear not, but increase the doubt.
She that affords poor mortals not a glance
Of knowledge, but is known by ignorance;
She that commits a rape on every sense,
Whose breath can countermand a pestilence;
She that can strike the best invention dead
Till baffled poetry hangs down the head—
She, she it is that doth contain all bliss,
100And makes the world but her periphrasis.
The Hecatomb to his Mistress.] (1651.) This poem is perhaps the best text to prove (or endeavour to prove) that Cleveland's object was really burlesque.
1 you] 'ye' 1651, 1653.
2 1651, 1653 read 'the' for 'your', and 'splaid': 'spade' 1677. 'Spay' or 'splay' to destroy the reproductive powers of a female.
3 the bastard] 1677 again alters 'the' to 'your', which does not seem good.
5 sacrilege] sacrifice 1677.
6 your] their 1653, &c.
7 postillers] The word means glossers or commentators on Scripture, and has acquired in several languages a contemptuous meaning from the frequently commonplace and trivial character of such things. 'ye fantastic' 1653.
9 1651, 1653 have 'his' for 'her', and in the next line 'his self' for 'herself'. The poem is particularly badly printed in this group, and I think the 1677 editors, in trying to mend it, have mistaken some places. Thus in ...
22 They print 'Would' for 'Should'. This may look better at first; but I at least can make no real sense of it. With 'Should' I can make some. The poet starts an extravagant comparison in 19-21; continues it in '[suppose] that Intelligence should', &c.; finds it will not do, and breaks it off with the parenthetical 'Let me' &c. To bring this out I have inserted the —.
24 1677 'And venture', with a full-stop at 'higher', not so well; but in ...
'undecline' 1651, 1653, &c. is nonsense; while in the next line 'sound agen' either points to a complete breakdown or indicates that, on the most recent Cockney principles, 'again' could be pronounced 'agine' and rhymes à la Mrs. Browning. The text is 1677.
28 set] shadow 1677.
35 define] describe 1677.
37 perfections 1651, 1653: perfection 1677.
43 brief = 'list'.
44 name-sak'd 1651, 1653.
45 the] your 1677.
52 1677, not nearly so well, 'see and' for 'feel, to'. You want the list of senses completed and summed up by such a palate in 'see', which, repeated, spoils all.
54 1651, 1653 have 'his' for 'hers'; but 'a double prize' is more vivid if less strictly defensible than 'the beauteous' of 1677. So in 56 1677 opens with 'Seeing each' instead of 'When from'—much feebler. But in 57-8 The text, which is 1677, is better than 1653:
Or can the sight be deaf if she but speak,
A well-tuned face, such moving rhetoric?
which indeed is, if not nonsense, most clumsily expressed, even if comma at 'face' be deleted.
60 and melts] yet melts 1677.
66 'sixt' 1651, 1653, 1677.
70-1 The punctuation of the old texts—no comma at 'flowers' and one at 'hearse'—makes the passage hard to understand. As I have altered this punctuation, it is clear.
73 what Divines] 1651, 1653, &c. 'with Divines'.
75 come now 1677: come, come 1651, 1653.
83 square] squared 1677. If all this is not burlesque it is very odd.
85 you undertake not 1651, 1653.
91 roll] rouse 1651, 1653. ravelled] revealed 1651, 1653.
98 the] her 1651, 1653.
100 The hundred lines making the hecatomb—and the metaphysical matter the subject of sacrifice.
Upon Sir Thomas Martin,
Who subscribed a Warrant thus: 'We the
Knights and Gentlemen of the Committee,' &c.
when there was no Knight but himself.
Hang out a flag and gather pence—A piece
Which Afric never bred nor swelling Greece
With stories' tympany, a beast so rare
No lecturer's wrought cap, nor Bartholomew Fair
Can match him; nature's whimsey, that outvies
Tradescant and his ark of novelties;
The Gog and Magog of prodigious sights,
With reverence to your eyes, Sir Thomas Knights.
But is this bigamy of titles due?
10Are you Sir Thomas and Sir Martin too?
Issachar couchant 'twixt a brace of sirs,
Thou knighthood in a pair of panniers;
Thou, that look'st, wrapped up in thy warlike leather,
Like Valentine and Orson bound together;
Spurs' representative! thou, that art able
To be a voider to King Arthur's table;
Who, in this sacrilegious mass of all,
It seems has swallowed Windsor's Hospital;
Pair-royal-headed Cerberus's cousin.
20Hercules' labours were a baker's dozen,
Had he but trumped on thee, whose forked neck
Might well have answered at the font for Smec.
But can a knighthood on a knighthood lie?
Metal on metal is ill armory;
And yet the known Godfrey of Bouillon's coat
Shines in exception to the herald's vote.
Great spirits move not by pedantic laws;
Their actions, though eccentric, state the cause,
And Priscian bleeds with honour. Caesar thus
30Subscribed two consuls with one Julius.
Tom, never oaded squire, scarce yeoman-high,
Is Tom twice dipped, knight of a double dye!
Fond man, whose fate is in his name betrayed!
It is the setting sun doubles his shade.
But it 's no matter, for amphibious he
May have a knight hanged, yet Sir Tom go free!
Upon Sir Thomas Martin.] (1651.) We here turn to the other side of Cleveland's work, where jest and earnest are combined in a very different fashion. Martin was a member of the Committee of Sequestration appointed under the Act of April 1, 1643, which, in a more fearless and thoroughgoing fashion than that of some later legislation, confiscated in a lump the property of certain bishops and of political opponents generally. The sequestrators for Cambridge were this man and two other knights—Sir Dudley North and Sir John Cutts; with two esquires—a Captain Symonds and Dudley Pope.
1 'pence apiece' 1651, which makes doubtful sense. 1653, 1677, and all others before me, have 'pence a piece', which I believe to be careless printing for the text above. The 'piece' is the same as the 'beast', and the brackets which follow in the originals are a printer's error. 'Piece', in this sense of 'rare object', is not uncommon. Cf. Prospero's 'Thy mother was a piece of virtue.' 'Pence apiece' (about the same as the Scotch fishwife's 'pennies each'), if not, as Mr. Berdan says, 'proverbial', is certainly a perfectly common expression, still I think existing, but it is difficult to see how what follows can thus suit it. 'Which' must have an antecedent.
4 'Bartlemew' 1651, 1653: 'Bartholmew' 1654. The word was, of course, pronounced 'Bartlemy,' and almost dissyllabically.
5 that outvies] 1651, 1653 'one that outvies', perhaps rightly.
6 Tredeskin 1651, 1653: Tredescant 1677.
11 The reference to the animal between two burdens to whom Issachar is biblically compared (Gen. xlix. 14) is perhaps meant to be additionally pointed by 'Sir Martin', the latter being one of the story-names of the much-enduring beast.
16 voider] The servant who clears the table; also, but here less probably, the tray or basket used for the purpose.
18 The 'Poor Knights of Windsor' having fallen, like other institutions, into the maw of plebeian and Puritan plunder.
19 The hyphen at 'Pair-royal', which Mr. Berdan has dropped, is important, the term being technical in certain card-games and meaning three cards of the same value—kings, &c.
21 trumped on thee = turned thee up like a trump.
22 'Smec'—of course—'tymnuus', and used both for the sake of contempt and as denoting a plurality of person.
24 The principle of this line is of course part of the A B C of the more modern and dogmatic heraldry: the application will lie either on sword or spur, the two characteristic insignia of knighthood and both metallic. 1677 changed 'ill armory' to 'false heraldry', and Scott was probably thinking of this line when he made Prince John and Wamba between them use the phrase in Ivanhoe.
25 Godfrey's arms as King of Jerusalem—five golden crosses on a silver shield—were commonly quoted, as Cleveland quotes them, in special exception to the rule. But my friend Mr. F. P. Barnard, Professor of Mediaeval Archaeology in the University of Liverpool, to whom I owe the materials of this note, tells me that he has collected many other cases, English and foreign. The objection, however, was originally a practical one, metal on metal and colour on colour being difficult to distinguish in the field. It passed into a technical rule later.
29 Priscian's head may not have bled here before it was broken by Butler; but the dates of the writing of Hudibras are quite uncertain.
31 oaded] This singular word is in all the editions I have seen. 1699 makes it 'loaded', with no sense that I can see in this passage. Can it be 'oathèd'—be sworn either to the commission of the peace or something else that gave the title 'Esquire'? 'Oad', however, = woad; cf. Minsheu, Guide into Tongues, 1617 'Oade, an hearbe. Vide Woade'. This would certainly suit the next line.
On the memory of Mr. Edward King,
drowned in the Irish Seas.
I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
His artificial grief who scans his eyes.
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muse's rosary?
I am no poet here; my pen 's the spout
Where the rain-water of mine eyes run out
In pity of that name, whose fate we see
Thus copied out in grief's hydrography.
The Muses are not mermaids, though upon
10His death the ocean might turn Helicon.
The sea's too rough for verse; who rhymes upon 't
With Xerxes strives to fetter th' Hellespont.
My tears will keep no channel, know no laws
To guide their streams, but (like the waves, their cause)
Run with disturbance, till they swallow me
As a description of his misery.
But can his spacious virtue find a grave
Within th' imposthumed bubble of a wave?
Whose learning if we sound, we must confess
20The sea but shallow, and him bottomless.
Could not the winds to countermand thy death
With their whole card of lungs redeem thy breath?
Or some new island in thy rescue peep
To heave thy resurrection from the deep,
That so the world might see thy safety wrought
With no less wonder than thyself was thought?
The famous Stagirite (who in his life
Had Nature as familiar as his wife)
Bequeathed his widow to survive with thee,
30Queen Dowager of all philosophy.
An ominous legacy, that did portend
Thy fate and predecessor's second end.
Some have affirmed that what on earth we find,
The sea can parallel in shape and kind.
Books, arts, and tongues were wanting, but in thee
Neptune hath got an university.
We'll dive no more for pearls; the hope to see
Thy sacred reliques of mortality
Shall welcome storms, and make the seamen prize
40His shipwreck now more than his merchandise.
He shall embrace the waves, and to thy tomb
As to a Royaller Exchange shall come.
What can we now expect? Water and fire,
Both elements our ruin do conspire.
And that dissolves us which doth us compound:
One Vatican was burnt, another drowned.
We of the gown our libraries must toss
To understand the greatness of our loss;
Be pupils to our grief, and so much grow
50In learning, as our sorrows overflow.
When we have filled the rundlets of our eyes
We'll issue 't forth and vent such elegies
As that our tears shall seem the Irish Seas,
We floating islands, living Hebrides.
On the Memory of Mr. Edward King.] First printed in the memorial volume of Cambridge verse to King, 1638; included in the Poems of 1651. It is of course easy (and it may be feared that it has too often been done) to contrast this disadvantageously with Lycidas. A specific or generic comparison, bringing out the difference of ephemeral and eternal style in verse, will not be found unprofitable and is almost as easy to make. No reader of Milton—and any one who has not read Milton is very unlikely to read this—can need information on King or on the circumstances of his death. 1651 and 1653 add a spurious duplicate, the last fourteen lines of W. More's elegy which followed Cleveland's in the Cambridge volume.
* On the Same.
Tell me no more of Stoics: canst thou tell
Who 'twas that when the waves began to swell,
The ship to sink, sad passengers to call
'Master, we perish'—slept secure of all?
Remember this, and him that waking kept
A mind as constant as he did that slept.
Canst thou give credit to his zeal and love
That went to Heaven, and to those flames above,
Wrapt in a fiery chariot? Since I heard
Who 'twas, that on his knees the vessel steered
With hands bolt up to Heaven, since I see
As yet no signs of his mortality,—
Pardon me, Reader, if I say he's gone
The self-same journey in a wat'ry one.
1 do] will 1638.
2 who] that 1638.
6 1651 'runs': all other editions (including 1638) 'run'. The attraction to 'eyes' is one of the commonest of things.
10 The everlasting confusion of 'mount' and 'fount' occurs in 'Helicon.'
26 wonder] miracle 1638.
34 1638, 1677, and later editions read, harmlessly but needlessly, 'for shape'.
46 'Vatican' used (as Mr. Berdan justly notes) as = 'library'.
Cleveland's warmest defenders must admit that this epicede is a triumph of 'frigidity'. And the personal note which Lycidas itself has been unfairly accused of wanting is here non-existent to my eyes, though some have discovered it.