Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,
Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore.
Taste the dark fluid with a dainty lip,
Digestion waits on pleasure as you sip.
Peter Altenberg, a Vienna poet, thus celebrated the cafés of his native city:
To The Coffee House!
When you are worried, have trouble of one sort or another—to the coffee house!
When she did not keep her appointment, for one reason or other—to the coffee house!
When your shoes are torn and dilapidated—coffee house!
When your income is four hundred crowns and you spend five hundred—coffee house!
You are a chair warmer in some office, while your ambition led you to seek professional honors—coffee house!
You could not find a mate to suit you—coffee house!
You feel like committing suicide—coffee house!
You hate and despise human beings, and at the same time you can not be happy without them—coffee house!
You compose a poem which you can not inflict upon friends you meet in the street—coffee house!
When your coal scuttle is empty, and your gas ration exhausted—coffee house!
When you need money for cigarettes, you touch the head waiter in the—coffee house!
When you are locked out and haven't the money to pay for unlocking the house door—coffee house!
When you acquire a new flame, and intend provoking the old one, you take the new one to the old one's—coffee house!
When you feel like hiding you dive into a—coffee house!
When you want to be seen in a new suit—coffee house!
When you can not get anything on trust anywhere else—coffee house!
English poets from Milton to Keats celebrated coffee. Milton (1608–1674) in his Comus thus acclaimed the beverage:
One sip of this
Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight
Beyond the bliss of dreams.
Alexander Pope, poet and satirist (1688–1744), has the oft-quoted lines:
Coffee which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.
In Carruthers' Life of Pope, we read that this poet inhaled the steam of coffee in order to obtain relief from the headaches to which he was subject. We can well understand the inspiration which called forth from him the following lines when he was not yet twenty:
As long as Mocha's happy tree shall grow,
While berries crackle, or while mills shall go;
While smoking streams from silver spouts shall glide,
Or China's earth receive the sable tide,
While coffee shall to British nymphs be dear,
While fragrant steams the bended head shall cheer,
Or grateful bitters shall delight the taste,
So long her honors, name and praise shall last.