Lines on Coffee
Translation from the French
Good coffee is more than a savory cup,
Its aroma has power to dry liquor up.
By coffee you get upon leaving the table
A mind full of wisdom, thoughts lucid, nerves stable;
And odd tho' it be, 't is none the less true,
Coffee's aid to digestion permits dining anew.
And what 's very true, tho' few people know it,
Fine coffee 's the basis of every fine poet;
For many a writer as windy as Boreas
Has been vastly improved by the drink ever glorious.
Coffee brightens the dullness of heavy philosophy,
And opens the science of mighty geometry.
Our law-makers, too, when the nectar imbibing,
Plan wondrous reforms, quite beyond the describing;
The odor of coffee they delight in inhaling,
And promise the country to alter laws ailing.
From the brow of the scholar coffee chases the wrinkles,
And mirth in his eyes like a firefly twinkles;
And he, who before was but a hack of old Homer,
Becomes an original, and that 's no misnomer.
Observe the astronomer who 's straining his eyes
In watching the planets which soar thro' the skies;
Alas, all those bright bodies seem hopelessly far
Till coffee discloses his own guiding star.
But greatest of wonders that coffee effects
Is to aid the news-editor as he little expects;
Coffee whispers the secrets of hidden diplomacy,
Hints rumors of wars and of scandals so racy.
Inspiration by coffee must be nigh unto magic,
For it conjures up facts that are certainly tragic;
And for a few pennies, coffee's small price per cup,
"Ye editor's" able to swallow the Universe up.
Esménard celebrated Captain de Clieu's romantic voyage to Martinique with the coffee plants from the Jardin des Plantes, in some admirable verses quoted in chapter II.
Among other notable poetic flights in praise of coffee produced in France mention should be made of: "L'Elogé du Café" (Eulogy of Coffee) a song in twenty-four couplets, Paris, Jacques Estienne, 1711; Le Café (Coffee), a fragment from the fourth chant (song) of La Grandeur de Dieu dans les merveilles de la Nature (The Grandeur of God in the Wonders of Nature) Marseilles; Le Café, extract from the fourth gastronomic song, by Berchoux; "A Mon Café" (To My Coffee), stanzas written by Ducis; Le Café, anonymous stanzas inserted in the Macedoine Poetique, 1824; a poem in Latin in the Abbé Olivier's collection; Le Bouquet Blanc et le Bouquet Noir, poesie en quatre chants; Le Café, C.D. Mery, 1837; Elogé du Café, S. Melaye, 1852.
Many Italian poets have sung the praises of coffee. L. Barotti wrote his poem, Il Caffè in 1681. Giuseppe Parini (1729–1799), Italy's great satirical and lyric poet and critic of the eighteenth century, in Il Giorno (The Day), gives a delightful pen picture of the manners and customs of Milan's polite society of the period. William Dean Howells quotes as follows from these poems (his own translation) in his Modern Italian Poets. The feast is over, and the lady signals to the cavalier that it is time to leave the table:
Spring to thy feet
The first of all, and, drawing near thy lady,
Remove her chair and offer her thy hand,
And lead her to the other room, nor suffer longer
That the stale reek of viands shall offend
Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites
The grateful odor of the coffee, where
It smokes upon a smaller table hid
And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums
That meanwhile burn, sweeten and purify
The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence
All lingering traces of the feast. Ye sick
And poor, whom misery or whom hope, perchance!
Has guided in the noonday to these doors.
Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng,
With mutilated limbs and squalid faces,
In litters and on crutches from afar
Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils
Drink in the nectar of the feast divine
That favourable zephyrs waft to you;
But do not dare besiege these noble precincts,
Importunately offering her that reigns
Within your loathsome spectacle of woe!
And now, sir, 't is your office to prepare
The tiny cup that then shall minister,
Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady's lips;
And now bethink thee whether she prefer
The boiling beverage much or little tempered
With sweet; or if, perchance, she likes it best,
As doth the barbarous spouse, then when she sits
Upon brocades of Persia, with light fingers,
The bearded visage of her lord caressing.
This is from Il Mezzogiorno (Noon). The other three poems, rounding out The Day, are Il Mattino (Morning), Il Vespre (Evening), and La Notte (Night). In Il Mattino, Parini sings:
Should dreary hypochondria's woes oppress thee,
Should round thy charming limbs in too great measure
Thy flesh increase, then with thy lips do honor
To that clear beverage, made from the well-bronzed,
The smoking, ardent beans Aleppo sends thee,
And distant Mocha too, a thousand ship-loads;
When slowly sipped it knows no rival.
Belli's Il Caffè supplies a partial bibliography of the Italian literature on coffee. There are many poems, some of them put to music. As late as 1921, there were published in Bologna some advertising verses on coffee by G.B. Zecchini with music by Cesare Cantino.
Pope Leo XIII, in his Horatian poem on Frugality composed in his eighty-eighth year, thus verses his appreciation of coffee: