Pope's famous Rape of the Lock grew out of coffee-house gossip. The poem contains the passage on coffee already quoted:
For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crowned;
The berries crackle and the mill turns round;
On shining altars of Japan they raise
The silver lamp: the fiery spirits blaze:
From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,
While China's earth receives the smoking tide.
At once they gratify their scent and taste.
And frequent cups prolong the rich repast
Straight hover round the fair her airy band;
Some, as she sipped, the fuming liquor fanned:
Some o'er her lap their careful plumes displayed,
Trembling, and conscious of the rich brocade.
Coffee (which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.)
Sent up in vapors to the baron's brain
New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.
Pope often broke the slumbers of his servant at night by calling him to prepare a cup of coffee; but for regular serving, it was his custom to grind and to prepare it upon the table.
William Cowper's fine tribute to "the cups that cheer but not inebriate", a phrase which he is said to have borrowed from Bishop Berkeley, was addressed to tea and not to coffee, to which it has not infrequently been wrongfully attributed. It is one of the most pleasing pictures in The Task.
Cowper refers to coffee but once in his writings. In his Pity for Poor Africans he expresses himself as "shocked at the ignorance of slaves":
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see;
What! Give up our desserts, our coffee and tea?
thus contenting himself, like many others, with words of pity where more active protest might sacrifice his personal ease and comfort.
Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), and John Keats (1795–1834), were worshippers at the shrine of coffee; while Charles Lamb, famous poet, essayist, humorist, and critic, has celebrated in verse the exploit of Captain de Clieu in the following delightful verses:
The Coffee Slips