Part 11

What though she be a dame of stone, The widow of Pygmalion, 10 As hard and unrelenting she As the new-crusted Niobe, Or (what doth more of statue carry) A nun of the Platonic quarry? Love melts the rigour which the rocks have bred-- A flint will break upon a feather-bed. For shame, you pretty female elves, Cease for to candy up your selves; No more, you sectaries of the game, No more of your calcining flame! 20 Women commence by Cupid's dart As a king hunting dubs a hart. Love's votaries enthral each other's soul, Till both of them live but upon parole.

Virtue's no more in womankind But the green-sickness of the mind; Philosophy (their new delight) A kind of charcoal appetite. There 's no sophistry prevails Where all-convincing love assails, 30 But the disputing petticoat will warp, As skilful gamesters are to seek at sharp.

The soldier, that man of iron, Whom ribs of horror all environ, That's strung with wire instead of veins, In whose embraces you're in chains, Let a magnetic girl appear, Straight he turns Cupid's cuirassier. Love storms his lips, and takes the fortress in, For all the bristled turnpikes of his chin. 40

Since love's artillery then checks The breastworks of the firmest sex, Come, let us in affections riot; Th' are sickly pleasures keep a diet. Give me a lover bold and free, Not eunuched with formality, Like an ambassador that beds a queen With the nice caution of a sword between.

[_The Antiplatonic._ (_1653_.) This is a sort of half-way house between Cleveland's burlesques and his serious or semi-serious poems like _Fuscara_. It is also nearer to Suckling and the graceful-graceless school than most of his things. It is good.]

[Line: 2 The alteration of _1677_ 'and ne'er fall to her' may be only an example of the tendency to 'regularize' (in this case by the omission of an extra foot). But I confess it seems to me better: for the slight irregularity of the construction replaces that of the line to advantage.]

[Line: 10 I don't know whether the conceit of 'Pygmalion's _widow_' returning to marble (or ivory) when her husband-lover's embraces ceased is original with Cleveland. If it is, I make him my compliment. There is at any rate no hint of it in Ovid.]

[Line: 18 _1677_ changed the good old '_for_' to 'thus'.]

[Line: 19 sectaries of] = 'heretics in'.]

[Line: 20 This is good: 'calcining flame' is good.]

[Line: 22 'dubs' is said to mean 'stabs', as it certainly means 'strikes'; but this seems to have little or no appropriateness here and to ignore the quaint conceit of 'commence' in its academic meaning. 'Women _take their degrees_ by Cupid's dart: as the fact of being hunted by a king _ennobles_ a hart.' Cupid = the King of Love.]

[Line: 24 'parole' too has a very delectable double meaning. This poem is really full of most excellent differences.]

[Lines: 25-9 The lesson of the unregenerate Donne and the never-regenerate Carew.]

[Line: 32 gamesters] = 'fencers'. to seek at sharp] = 'not good at sword-play'.]

[Line: 33 'The sol-di-er'. By the way, did Butler borrow this 'iron' and 'environ' rhyme from Cleveland?]

[Line: 43 The apostrophating mania made _1653_ contract to 'let's' and spoil the verse.]

[Line: 44 Th'] here of course = 'they'.]

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 Where all delicious sweets are hived. 10 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, That alm'ner of transpiring balm; 20 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, A proper hawk for such a fist, 30 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 Like a thick-branching pedigree. 40 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 Had sucked the toll of all her span, 50 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, Fraught both with east and western prize; 60 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 Ravaillac to my Queen of Love! 70 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 Stung her, 'cause sweeter than himself. 80 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.]

[Line: 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.]

[Line: 13 tincture] Said to be used here in an alchemical sense for 'gold'. But the plain meaning is much better.]

[Line: 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?' ]

[Line: 20 Cleveland of course uses the correct and not the modern and blundering sense of 'transpire'.]

[Line: 22 This 'jelly gloved' is _not_ like 'mobled queen' or 'calcining flame'.]

[Lines: 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.]

[Line: 28 _1653_, less well, '_the_ nectar'.]

[Line: 30 Neat, i' faith!]

[Line: 33 'a lovely _brown_' as being _Fuscara_.]

[Line: 35 Here Cleveland dares his 'ill armoury again'; _v. sup._, p. 25. 'He' _1651_, _1653_: 'Her' _1677_.]

[Line: 48 as] _1677_, unnecessarily, 'like'. Some (baddish) editions '_on_ a bracelet'.]

[Line: 52 Hardly necessary to notice as another of Cleveland's Shakespearian touches.]

[Line: 62 The correcter form is 'lancep_e_sade'.]

[Line: 70 '_Ratillias_' _1651_: '_Ratilias_' _1653_: corrected in _1677_.]

[Line: 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 And ope the casements of thine eyes. 10 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 And do believe thou wert born old. 20 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 The world thy worth; they kenned thee well. 30 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, It stoops each morn to take a smell. 10 Then I'll fetch from the Ph[oe]nix' 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 Before one sickly minute die. 20 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, And then my lips shall kiss them dry; 30 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.

To sell thyself dost thou intend 10 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, Live double for 't. 20 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, And use the simony of a cough 30 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 But thee devours. 40 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 Pledges of more distilling sweets, 50 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'.]

[Line: 1 'Shrieve' of course = 'Sheriff'.]

[Lines: 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.]

[Line: 9 rebated] The opposite of '_un_bated' in _Hamlet_--with the button _on_.]

[Line: 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_.]

[Lines: 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.]

[Line: 27 The siege of Ostend (1601-4) lasted three years and seventy-seven days.]

[Line: 34 Did a far greater Cambridge poet think of this in writing

'When the locks are crisp and curl'd?'

(_The Vision of Sin._)]

[Line: 48 regealing] Cleveland seems to use this unusual word in the sense of '_un_freezing'.]

[Line: 51 _1677_ spoils sense and verse alike by beginning the line with 'Than'. The 'tears' _are_ the 'bath'.]

Poems in 1677 but not in 1653.

Upon Princess Elizabeth, born the night before New Year's Day.

Astrologers say Venus, the self-same star, Is both our Hesperus and Lucifer; The antitype, this Venus, makes it true; She shuts the old year and begins the new. Her brother with a star at noon was born; She, like a star both of the eve and morn. Count o'er the stars, fair Queen, in babes, and vie With every year a new Epiphany.

[_Upon Princess Elizabeth._ Not before _1677_. This slight thing is inaccurately entitled, for the Princess was born on December 26, 1638.]

[Line: 1 The rhyme of 'star' and 'Lucif_er_', which occurs (with 'travell_er_') in Dryden, is--like all Cleveland's rhymes, I think without exception--perfectly sound on the general principle then observed, and observed partly at all times, that _a vowel may, for rhyming purposes, take the sound that it has in a similar connexion but in another word_.]

[Line: 5 brother] Charles II.]

The General Eclipse.

Ladies that gild the glittering noon, And by reflection mend his ray, Whose beauty makes the sprightly sun To dance as upon Easter-day, What are you now the Queen 's away?

Courageous Eagles, who have whet Your eyes upon majestic light, And thence derived such martial heat That still your looks maintain the fight, What are you since the King's good-night? 10

Cavalier-buds, whom Nature teems As a reserve for England's throne, Spirits whose double edge redeems The last Age and adorns your own, What are you now the Prince is gone?

As an obstructed fountain's head Cuts the entail off from the streams, And brooks are disinherited, Honour and Beauty are mere dreams Since Charles and Mary lost their beams! 20 Criminal Valours, who commit Your gallantry, whose paean brings A psalm of mercy after it, In this sad solstice of the King's, Your victory hath mewed her wings!

See, how your soldier wears his cage Of iron like the captive Turk, And as the guerdon of his rage! See, how your glimmering Peers do lurk, Or at the best, work journey-work! 30

Thus 'tis a general eclipse, And the whole world is al-a-mort; Only the House of Commons trips The stage in a triumphant sort. Now e'en John Lilburn take 'em for't!

[_The General Eclipse._ The poem is of course a sort of variation or _scherzo_ on 'You meaner beauties of the night'.]

[Line: 20 We are so accustomed to the double name 'Henrietta Maria' that the simple 'Queen Mary' may seem strange. But it was the Cavalier word at Naseby.]

[Line: 32 al-a-mort] Formerly quite naturalized, especially in the form all-amort. See _N.E.D._, s.v. 'Alamort'.]

Upon the King's Return from Scotland.

Returned, I'll ne'er believe 't; first prove him hence; Kings travel by their beams and influence. Who says the soul gives out her gests, or goes A flitting progress 'twixt the head and toes? She rules by omnipresence, and shall we Deny a prince the same ubiquity? Or grant he went, and, 'cause the knot was slack, Girt both the nations with his zodiac, Yet as the tree at once both upward shoots, And just as much grows downward to the roots, 10 So at the same time that he posted thither By counter-stages he rebounded hither. Hither and hence at once; thus every sphere Doth by a double motion interfere; And when his native form inclines him east, By the first mover he is ravished west. Have you not seen how the divided dam Runs to the summons of her hungry lamb; But when the twin cries halves, she quits the first? Nature's commendam must be likewise nursed. 20 So were his journeys like the spider spun Out of his bowels of compassion. Two realms, like Cacus, so his steps transpose, His feet still contradict him as he goes. England 's returned that was a banished soil. The bullet flying makes the gun recoil. Death 's but a separation, though endorsed With spade and javelin; we were thus divorced. Our soul hath taken wing while we express The corpse, returning to our principles. 30 But the Crab-tropic must not now prevail; Islands go back but when you're under sail. So his retreat hath rectified that wrong; Backward is forward in the Hebrew tongue. Now the Church Militant in plenty rests, Nor fears, like th' Amazon, to lose her breasts. Her means are safe; not squeezed until the blood Mix with the milk and choke the tender brood. She, that hath been the floating ark, is that She that 's now seated on Mount Ararat. 40 Quits Charles; our souls did guard him northward thus Now he the counterpart comes south to us.

[_Upon the King's Return, &c._ In 1641--an ill-omened and unsuccessful journey, which lasted from August to November. The piece is one of the very few of those in _Cleaveland Revived_ acknowledged and admitted by _Clievelandi Vindiciae_.]

[Line: 3 _1659_ 'ghests'; _1662_, _1668_ 'guests'; _1677_ 'gests'. See _N.E.D._, s.v. 'gest' _sb._^{4}. which defines it as 'the various stages of a journey, especially of a royal progress; the route followed or planned'.]

[Line: 20 commendam] (misprinted '-dum' from _1659_ to _1677_). A benefice held with another; something additional.]

[Line: 21: 'spider' _1677_; 'spider's' _1659_, _1662_, _1668_.]

[Line: 25 'banished' _1677_: 'barren' _1659_, _1662_, _1668_.]

[Line: 30 In this very obscure and ultra-Clevelandian line _1677_ reads 'their'. I think 'our'--the reading of _Cleaveland Revived_, followed by _1662_ and _1668_--is better. But the whole poem (one of Cleveland's earliest political attempts) is weak and pithless.]

[Line: 33 'that' _1687_: 'the' _1659_, _1662_, _1668_.]

[Line: 42 'counterpart' _1677_: 'counterpane' _1659_, _1662_, _1668_.]

Poems certainly or almost certainly Cleveland's but not included in 1653 or 1677.

[_Poems, &c._ I have been exceedingly chary of admission under this head, for there seems to me to be no reasonable _via media_ between such severity and the complete reprinting of _1687_--with perhaps the _known_ larcenies in that and its originals left out. Thus, of eleven poems given--but as 'not in _1677_'--by Mr. Berdan I have kept but three, besides one or two which, though not in _1677_, are in _1653_, and so appear above. Of these the Jonson Elegy from _Jonsonus Virbius_ is signed, and as well authenticated as anything can be; _News from Newcastle_ is quoted by Johnson and therefore of importance to students of the _Lives_. The _Elegy upon Charles I_ is in _1654_ among the poems which that collection adds to _1653_, is very like him, and relieves Cleveland partly, if not wholly, from the charge of being wanting to the greatest occasion of his life and calling.]

An Elegy on Ben Jonson.

Who first reformed our stage with justest laws, And was the first best judge in his own cause; Who, when his actors trembled for applause, Could (with a noble confidence) prefer His own, by right, to a whole theatre; From principles which he knew could not err:

Who to his fable did his persons fit, With all the properties of art and wit, And above all that could be acted, writ:

Who public follies did to covert drive, 10 Which he again could cunningly retrive, Leaving them no ground to rest on and thrive:

Here JONSON lies, whom, had I named before, In that one word alone I had paid more Than can be now, when plenty makes me poor.

J. CL.