Saturday, July 26, 2008

Koba the Dread, Martin Amis

Koba the Dread; Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis, Vintage International, New York, 2003

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine...quotes Vasily Grossman's essayistic documentary novel Forever Flowering: 'And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads--thin, wide lips--and some of them resembled fish, mouths open' (3,880 lives). 3

This is from a letter [by Stalin] addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime: 'The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They're its shit.' 15

...all the camps were death camps, by the nature of things. Those not immediately killed at Auschwitz, which was a slave camp and a death camp, tended to last three months. Two years seems to have been the average for the slave camps of the gulag archipelago. 18

Tibor was an unusally late riser, and Kingsley once complained to Nina about it. She said that her husband sometimes needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate sleep. Even in England. He needs, said Nina, "to be absolutely certain that they won't be coming for him that night." 19-20

This is the usual figure for military losses in World War I (all belligerent nations) : c. 7,800,000. 25

Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky. In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin's doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 =24, 24 + 12 =36...The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography: 'He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childish scrawls...The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old.' 26

During an earlier Russian famine, that of 1891, in which half a million died...a twenty-two-year-old lawyer, refused to participate in the effort--and, indeed, publicly denounced it. This was Lenin:...[who had it that] as a friend put it, 'famine would have numerous positive results...destroying the outdated peasant economy...usher in socialism...destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too.' 30

As for the Russians themselves, Lenin was frankly racist in his settled dislike for them. They were fools and bunglers, and "too soft" to run an efficient police state. He made no secret of his preference for Germans. 30

The differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative. Stalin's one true novelty was the discovery of another stratum of society in need of purgation: Bolsheviks. 32

There is no hint in any of the vast array of archival material to suggest that [Lenin] was troubled by his conscience about anyo f the long list of destructive measures he took (Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography). 33

Trotsky: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life." 35

Two comrades are discussing the inexplicable failure of a luxurious, state-run, Western-style cocktail lounge, recently opened in Moscow. The place is going under, despite all the gimmicks: rock music, light shows, skimpily clad waitresses. Why? Is it the furnishings? No, it can't be the furnishings: they were all imported from Milan, at startling cost. Is it the cocktails? No, it can't be the cocktails: the booze is of the finest, and the bartenders are all from the London Savoy. Is it the waitresses, in their bustiers and cupless brassieres, their thongs, their G-strings? No, it can't be the waitresses...they've all been loyal party members for at least forty-five years. 46

Stalin famously said: "Death solves all problems. No man, no problem." 57

First, arrest...Next, imprisonment and interrogation: this period normally lasted about three months...The interrogators needed confessions...because these had been demanded from above by quota--that cornerstone of Bolshevik methodology. 61

This is Solzhenitsyn's description of "the swan dive": 'A long piece of rough towelling was inserted between the prisoner's jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking--and without water and food for two days.' Another method was to confine the prisoner in a dark wooden closet where 'hundreds, maybe even thousands of bedbugs had been allowed to multiply. The guards removed the prisoner's jacket or field shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawling on him from the walls or falling off the ceiling . At first he waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur.'...Chulpenyev was kept for a month on three and a half ounces of bread, after which--when he had just been brought in from the pit [a deep grave in which the half-stripped suspect lay open day and night to the elements]...60-62

Three months of that and then the prisoners faced the journey to their islands in the archipelago. The descriptions of these train rides match anything in the literature of the Shoah...No, the children were there, as victims, and not just on the transports. About 1 million children died in the Holocaust. About 3 million children died in the Terror-Famine of 1933...The journey [train ride] would tend to be much longer (and much colder: Stalin, as we shall see, had things that Hitler didn't have)--a month, six weeks. 63-64

At Vanino, en route to Kolyma, the prisoners entered what was in effect a slave market, where they were prodded and graded and assigned...In that immense, cavernous, murky hold [of the slaveship] were crammed more than two thousand women. From the floor to the ceiling, as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages...Michael Solomon: 'One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age.' 67

In the arctic camps the prisoners were not supposed to work outside when the temperature fell below minus fifty--or at any rate sixty--degrees Fahrenheit. At fifty below it starts to be difficult to breathe. 70

The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to go there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus and kerosene to their wounds. / Goldmining could break a strong man's health forever in three weeks. A three-week logging term was likewise know as "dry execution". 70

Marx dismissed slavery as unproductive by definition. But Frenkel argued that it could work economically--so long as the slaves died very quickly. Solzhenitsyn seems to be quoting Frenkel here: " 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months--after that we don't need him any more.' " 72

There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s. The Holocaust, the Shoah...There are no names for what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russians refer, totemically, to "the twenty million" 75

Some isolators consisted of split logs thrown together; some had no roofs, exposing the prisoners to the elements--and the insects; some were designed to force the prisoner to stand upright (seventy-two hours of this could be enough to cause permanent damage to the knees.) 78

Bardach was now obliged to go on a journey within himself and examine the boundaries of his spirit: "Is this unbearable, or is it something I can survive? I wondered. What is unbearable? How am I to decide what my limit is?...What is it like to break down?" He thought of the self-mutilators...He thought of the dokhodyagas, the "goners," the garbage-eaters: "Why some and not others?...the dokhodyaga: the goners. It is easy to miss the goners because (as Bardach says), "rummaging through the garbage, eating rancid scraps to meat, chewing on fish skeletons--such behavior was so common that no one noticed." The goners became "semi-idiots," writes Vladamir Petrov, "whom no amount of beating could drive from the refuse heaps." 79-80

Solzhenitsyn gives a figure ("a modest estimate") of 40-50 million who were given long sentences in the gulag from 1917 to 1953... 83

The Holocaust is "the only example which history offers to date of a deliberate policy aimed at the total physical destruction of every member of an ethnic group," write Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison--whereas, under Stalin, "no ethnic group was singled out for total annihilation." The distinction thus resides in the word "total," because Lenin pursued genocidal policies (de-Cossackization) and so of course did Stalin (see below). 85

Orlando Figes: The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment--it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx--which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals... 85

Marxism was the product of the intellectual middle classes; Nazism was yellow, tabloidal, of the gutter. Marxism made wholly unrealistic demands on human nature; Nazism constituted a direct appeal to the reptile brain. 85

Stalin, unlike Hitler, did his worst...Hitler, by contrast, did not do his worst. Hitler's worst stands like a great thrown shadow, and implicitly affects our sense of his crimes...[but] fundamentally suicidal in tendency, Nazism was incapable of maturation. Twelve years was perhaps the natural lifespan for such preternatural virulence. 91

"At Oimyakon [in the Kolyma] a temperature has been recorded of - 97.8 F. In far less cold, steel splits, tyres explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call 'the whispering of the stars.' " (From Colin Thubron's In Siberia.) 92

There was a national census in 1937, the first since 1926, which had shown a population of 147 million. Extrapolating from the growth figures of the 1920s, Stalin said that he expected a new total of 170 million. The Census Board reported a figure of 163 million--a figure that reflected the consequences of Stalin's policies. So Stalin had the Census Board arrested and shot. 97

both Adolf and Iosif served as choirboys; and both would grow to a height of five feet four. 98

"Stalin," or course, was another self-imposed nickname. Man of Steel. 98

We don't know how Stalin felt about his childhood. But we know how he felt about Georgia. Why take it out on your parents, when you can take it out on a province? 99

...on the matter of Georgia came close to ending his career: itself amazing testimony that the strength of his feelings now outweighed his self-interest. (Power, as we shall see, had in instantly deranging effect on Stalin; during the Civil War he was chronically insubordinate and trigger-happy; it took him years before he learned to control the glandular excitements that power roiled in him.) 100

In 1937 the Great Terror reached Transcaucasia: "Nowhere were victims subjected to more atrocious treatment," writes Robert C. Tucker, "than in Georgia." Of the 644 delegates to the Georgian party congress, in May, 425 were either shot or dispatched to the gulag... 101

In 1925 Stalin appointed Jan Sten, deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute, as his private tutor. Sten's job was to tighten Stalin's grip on dialectical materialism. Twice a week, for three years, Sten came to the Kremlin apartment and coached his pupil on Hegel, Kant, Feurerbach, Fichte, Schelling, Plekhanov, Kautsky, and Francis Bradley (Appearance and Reality). Stalin, ominously, found Sten's voice "monotonous," but he managed to sit through the lessons, occasionally breaking in with such queries as "Who uses all this rubbish in practice?" and "What's all this got to do with the class struggle?" As Bukharin put it, Stalin was "eaten up by the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks."...The tutorials ended in 1928. By December 1930 Stalin felt himself equipped to lecture the lecturers...The final result of his intervention was that "philosophy shriveled up," as Volkogonov puts it: "no one had the courage to write anything more on the subject." 118-119

Collectivization (1929-33) was the opening and defining phase of Stalin's untrammeled power: it was the first thing he did the moment his hands were free...During Collectivization Stalin is reckoned to have killed about 4 million children. For the man himself, though, and for the man's psychology, the most salient feature of Collectivization was the abysmal depth, the gigantic reach, of its failure. In his introductory administrative push, Stalin ruined the countryside for the rest of the century. 120-121

During the earlier years of the 1920s Stalin had presented himself as a godfearing centrist. Then, with the opposition defeated, he veered wildly Left. 122

Stalin's aims were clear: crash Collectivization would, through all-out grain exports, finance wildfire industrialization, resulting in breakneck militarization to secure state and empire... 123

On December 21, 1929, Stalin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, to hyperbolic acclaim; this date also marks the birth of the "cult of personality", which would take such a toll on his mental health. Eight days later he announced his policy of "liquidating the kulaks as a class." / Solzhenitsyn is insisten ("This is very important, the most important thing") that Dekulkization was chiefly a means of terrorizing the other peasants into submission: "Without frightening them to death there was no way of taking back the land which the Revolution had given them, and planting them on that same land as serfs." 124

Not all Soviet villages contained kulaks, but all Soviet villages had to be terrorized, so kulaks had to be found in all Soviet villages. Stalin was, of course, using a quota system (as he could in the Great Terror). He seemed to have in mind just under 10 percent: about 12 million people. 125

1933...It starts to be the practice that orphaned children are shot en masse. 129

As harvest yields fell, requisitioning quotas grew, with only one possible outcome. Stalin just went at the peasants until there was nobody there to sow the next harvest. 130

Considering what he could have got up to, and considering what Beria (for instance) actually did get up to, Stalin's sexual life was remarkably prim. 131

Hitler: "A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman." 132

When Milovan Djilas personally protested that the Red Army was raping Yugoslav women, Stalin said of his universal soldier: "How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?" 135

The use of famine as a weapon of the state against the populace is generally considered to be a Stalinist innovation (later taken up by Mao and other Communist leaders), but Lenin's famine of 1921-22 had its terroristic aspects. Both famines had the same cause: punitive food-requisitioning. 138

About 5 million died in the Ukraine, and about 2 million died in the Kuban, Don and Volga regions in Kazakhstan. These were formerly the richest agricultural lands in the USSR. 141

You might denounce someone for fear of their denouncing you; you could be denounced for not doing enough denouncing... 143

Tribute must now be paid to the most prodigious denouncer of all, the great Nikolaenko, scourge of Kiev...In Kiev, pavements emptied when Nikolaenko stepped out; her presence in a room spread mortal fear. Eventually Pavel Postyshev (First Secretary in the Ukraine, candidate member of the Politburo) expelled Nikolaenko from the Party. Stalin reinstated her "with honor."...When the new, post-purge bosses, headed by Khrushchev, had established themselves in Kiev, Nikolaenko denounced Krushchev's deputy, Korotchenko. Krushchev defended his man, a posture Stalin adjudged to be "incorrect."...But then Nikolaenko denounced Krushchev, a first-echelon toady and placeman, for "bourgeois nationalism," and Stalin finally conceded that she was nuts. She helped destroy about 8,000 people. 143-145

Until 1930 the economy and culture of Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, was based on nomadism and transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock.) The plan was to Dekulakize these wanderers, and then Collectivize them. Once denomadized, the Kazakhstanis would devote themselves to agriculture. But the land was not suitable for agriculture. What it was suitable for was nomadism and transhumance. The plan didn't work out. Over the next two years Kazakhstan lost 80 percent of its livestock. And 40 percent of its population: famine and disease. 147

...10 million peasant dead (this was Stalin's own figure, in conversation with Churchill) might be acceptable to a good Bolshevik, the political objective having been achieved (unmediated control of the peasant produce.) 148

Stalin took the podium at the Congress to a standing ovation--of which, said Pravda, "it seemed there would be no end."...Who could end the applause for Stalin when Stalin wasn't there? At a party conference in Moscow...the proceedings wound up with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone got to their feet and started applauding; and no one dared stop...After ten minutes...The first man to stop clapping (a local factory director) was arrested the next day and given ten years on another charge. 150-151

Since 1917 the Bolsheviks had systematically undermined the family. Divorce was encouraged (to achieve it you were simply obliged to notify your spouse by postcard); incest, bigamy, adultery and abortion were decriminalized; families were scattered by labor-direction and deportation; and children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song. 154

Varlam Shalamov...got out of Kolyma in 1951...Then he wrote Kolyma Tales...One prisoner hangs himself in a tree fork "without even using a rope." Another finds that his fingers have been permanently molded by the tools he wields (he "never expected to be able to straighten out his hand again"). Another's rubber galoshes "were so full of pus and blood that his feet sloshed at every step--as if through a puddle." Men weep frequently, over a pair of lost socks, for instance, or from the cold (but not from hunger, which produces an agonizing but tearless wrath.) They all dream the same dream "of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels." And they are forgetting everything. A professor of philosophy forgets his wife's name. A doctor begins to doubt that he ever was a doctor... 156

...wiretaps reveal that Svetlana [Stalin's daughter] was having an affair with a Jewish scenarist called Alexei Kapler, whom Stalin promptly dispatched to Vorkuta (espionage: five years). "But I love him!" protested Svetlana. " 'Love!' screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me across the face, twice. 'Just look, nurse, how low she's sunk!' He could no longer restrain himself. 'Such a war going on, and she's busy the whole time fucking!' " 162

Three weeks after Stalin's death Vasily [son] suffered a demotion: he was, in fact, dismissed from the service (and forbidden to wear military uniform). He was thirty-two, and died nine years later. Krushchev found him uncontrollable. There were periods of prison and exile. He said that he was thinking of becoming the manager of a swimming pool. At the age of forty he was an invalid. There were four wives. 164

Stalin hated Yakov [son] because Yakov was Georgian...Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father's additional disgust...He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin)...Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, "Ha! He couldn't even shoot straight" (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, "Ha! You missed!")...[Yakov] fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were "malicious traitors" whose families were "subject to arrest."...As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov's wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused ("I have no son called Yakov")...Yakov passed through three concentration camps--Hammelburg, Lubeck, Sachsenhausen--and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov make his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wife. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss. 165

Compromised by power (and by increasing isolation from unwelcome truths), his sense of reality was by now unquestionably very weak; but it would be wrong to think of him in a continuous state of cognitive disarray. This underestimates his vanity and his pedantry. 166

Purging was hard, and hardness was a Bolshevik virtue. Stalin was never really sure that he was the cleverest or the bravest or the most visionary or even the most powerful. But he knew he was the hardest. 167

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Krushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: "He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones." 171

In later years, as we have already mentioned, Stalin's cinematic tastes narrowed. Out went the cowboy films, the comedies and musicals. Stalin preferred to watch propaganda: pseudo-newsreels about life on the collective farms. The boards groan with fruit and vegetables, with suckling pig, with enormous geese. After their banquet the reapers return singing to the fields... 172-173

...5 percent of the population had been arrested as some sort of enemy of the people...the members of those families were also subject to sentence: as members of the family of an enemy of the people. By 1939, it is fair to say, all the people were enemies of the people. 178

Santayana's definition of the fanatic: he redoubles his efforts while forgetting his aims. He doesn't want to think or to know. He just wants to believe. 178

...after a night-long interrogation, a ten-year-old boy admitted his involvement with a fascist organization from the age of seven (what happened to him? Before exacting the supreme penalty, did they wait for his twelfth birthday?); a twelve-year-old boy was raped by his interrogator, protested to the duty officer, and was duly shot... 179

Hitler confined his cultural interventions to the fields where he felt, wrongly, that he had competence: art and architecture. But Stalin's superbity was omnivorous. 180

Astronomy. Research on sunspots was felt to have taken an un-Marxist turn. In the years of the Terror more than two dozen leading astronomy disappeared. 182

Linguistics. In the early 1930s Stalin championed the teachings of N. Marr, who held a) that language was a class phenomenon (a superstructure over the relations of production), and b) that all words derived from the sounds "rosh", "sal", "ber" and "yon." Linguisticians who held otherwise were jailed or shot. 182

...it was the regime's extraordinary intention to stamp out private, even individual, worship too (aiming to replace "faith in God with faith in science and the machine")...church weddings were declared void (and funeral rites forbidden). 185

...Wehrmacht: the greatest war machine ever assembled, and heading straight for him. He knew that his citizens would not lay down their lives for socialism. What would they lay down their lives for? Consulting this sudden reality, Stalin saw that religion was still there--that religion, funnily enough, belonged to the real. 186

While I was getting through the shelf of books I have read about him, there were four occasions where Stalin made me laugh. Laugh undisgustedly and with warmth, as if he were a comic creation going enjoyably through his hoops. These are all things Stalin said. Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh. 192

When the news came through ("they are bombing our cities"), Stalin's psyche simply fell away. It prostrated him; he became a bag of bones in a gray tunic; he was nothing but a power vacuum. 194

The way Stalin saw it, the imperialist powers would embroil themselves in a marathon bloodbath in Europe, after which a strengthened Red Army would do some empire-building of its own among the ruins. This dream was rather seriously undermined when Hitler took France in six weeks--leaving Stalin pacing the floor and giving vent to many a "choice" obscenity (the adjective is Krushchev's). By June 1941 Hitler's war record went as follows: Poland in twenty-seven days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Norway in twenty-three days, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, France in thirty-nine, Yugoslavia in twelve, and Greece in twenty-one. 195

All writers agree that Stalin underestimated Hitler's fanaticism. Germany, Stalin thought, would never risk a war on two fronts. 198

Meanwhile, across the border, Hitler's psychological trouble was revealing itself as clinical--as organic. In early 1941 he was already sufficiently "confident" to undertake the invasion of Russia a) without a war economy, and b) without antifreeze. The is to say, he gambled on victory in a single campaign: a physical impossibility. 209

After the briefcase-bomb attempt on his life (July 1944)...Having earlier lost his voice, Hitler, after the bomb attack, lost his hearing. His isolation was complete. 209-210

...Stalin's popularity was wholly--Hitler's merely largely--a matter of manipulation...There's the famous anecdote--the two men are meeting in the streets of Moscow, during the height of the Terror: "If only someone would tell Stalin!" and so on. And this was not a joke, and these were no ordinary Ivans. The two men were Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak. 213

"Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution," Lenin had tersely decided. 217

...Jewish activists interrogated by the Cheka in 1939 "were treated very badly," but "the curses and imprecations never had any racial tone. When they were reinterrogated in 1942-1943, anti-Semitic abuse had become the norm." The shift in emphasis, like everything else, was top-down. 219

The proximate cause of the final delerium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of "spontaneity"; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed allegiance other than to "the Soviet power." 221

The boy told him, inter alia, about the "mosquito treatment": these insects, like airborne piranha, could turn a man into a skeleton within hours. Prisoners were also strapped to logs and then bounced down the stone steps of the fortress. 227

On March 1 stirred at midday, as usual. In the panty the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 p.m. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. Koba was lying in soiled pajamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce "a buzzing sound"--the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), "in irons." 233

In 1948, Stalin made the following addition to his official biography, Short Course...Stalin then made this addition to that addition: "Although the performed his task of leader of the Party with commensurate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation." 240

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Lucasta, Richard Lovelace

Lucasta, Richard Lovelace, Kessinger 2004

To the Sea of Chaste Delight;
Let me cast the Drop I write.
/ And as at Loretto's shrine
Caesar shovels in his mine,
Th' Empres spreads her carkanets,
The lords submit their coronets,
Knights their chased armes hang by,
Maids diamond-ruby fancies tye;
Whilst from the pilgrim she wears
One poore false pearl, but ten true tears:
/So among the Orient prize,
(Saphyr-onyx eulogies)
Offer'd up unto your fame,
Take my GARNET-DUBLET name,
And vouchsafe 'midst those rich joyes
(With devotion) these TOYES.
/Richard Lovelace

(The Dedication/To the Right Hon. My Lady Anne Lovelace)


I.
If to be absent were to be
Away from thee;
Or that when I am gone,
You or I were alone;
Then my LUCASTA might I crave
Pity from blustring winde or swallowing wave.

II.
But I'le not sigh one blast or gale
To swell my saile,
Or pay a teare to swage
The foaming blew-gods rage;
For whether he will let me passe
Or no, I'm still as happy as I was.

III.
Though the seas and land betwixt us both,
Our faith and troth,
Like separated soules,
All time and space controules:
Above the highest sphere wee meet,
Unseene, unknowne, and greet as angels greet.

(Song/To Lucasta, Going Beyond the Seas)


I.
Tell me not, (sweet,) I am unkinde,
That from the nunnerie
Of thy chaste breast and quiet minde
To warre and armes I flie.

II.
True: a new Mistresse now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith imbrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

III.
Yet this inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Lov'd I not Honour more.

(Song/To Lucasta. Going to the Warres.)


Through foul we follow faire

(A Paradox)


The god, that constant keeps
Unto his deities,
Is poore in joyes, and sleepes
Imprison'd in the skies.
This knew the wisest, who
From Juno stole, below
To love a bear or cow.

(A Paradox)

I.
Amarantha sweet and faire,
Ah brade no more that shining haire!
As my curious hand or eye,
Hovering round thee, let it flye.

II.
Let it flye as unconfin'd
As it's calme ravisher, the winde,
Who hath left his darling, th'East,
To wanton o're that spicie neast.

III.
Ev'ry tresse must be confest:
But neatly tangled at the best;
Like a clue of golden thread,
Most excellently ravelled.

IV.
Doe not then winde up that light
In ribands, and o'er-cloud in night,
Like the sun in's early ray;
But shake your head, and scatter day.

V.
See, 'tis broke! within this grove,
The bower and the walkes of love,
Weary lye we downe and rest,
And fanne each other's panting breast.

VI.
Heere wee'll strippe and coole our fire,
In creame below, in milk-baths higher:
And when all wells are drawne dry,
I'll drink a teare out of thine eye.

VII.
Which our very joys shall leave,
That sorrowes thus we can deceive;
Or our very sorrowes weepe,
That joyes so ripe so little keepe.

(Song/To Amarantha; That She Would Dishevell Her Haire.)


And now this heart is all his sport,
Which as a ball he boundeth

(A Loose Saraband.)


Sometimes he cloathes it gay and fine,
Then straight againe he strips it.

(A Loose Saraband.)


There warme it gan to throb and bleed;
She knew that smart, and grieved;
At length this poore condemned heart
With these rich drugges repreeved.

(A Loose Saraband.)


She proab'd it with her constancie,
And found no rancor nigh it

(A Loose Saraband.)


Lu. But ah, this ling'ring, murdring farewel!
Death quickly wounds, and wounding cures the ill.
Alex. It is the glory of a valiant lover,
Still to be dying, still for to recover.

(Dialogue.)


Alex. No, whilst light raigns, LUCASTA still rules here,
And all the night shines wholy in this sphere.
Lu. I know no morne but my ALEXIS ray,
To my dark thoughts the breaking of the day.

(Dialogue.)


I would love a PARLIAMENT
As a maine prop from Heav'n sent;
But ah! who's he, that would be wedded
To th'fairest body that's beheaded?

(To Lucasta. From Prison)


Eastrich! thou feathered foole, and easie prey,
That larger sailes to thy broad vessell needst;

(Lucasta's Fanne, With a Looking-Glasse in It.)


Sometime they wing her side, (thee) strive to drown
The day's eyes piercing beames, whose am'rous heat
Sollicites still, 'till with this shield of downe
From her brave face his glowing fires are beat.

(Lucasta's Fanne, With a Looking-Glasse in It.)


Yee drops, that dew th'Arabian bowers,
Tell me, did you e're smell or view
On any leafe of all your flowers
Soe sweet a sent, so rich a hiew?

(Lucasta, Taking the Waters at Tunbridge.)


And now her teares nor griev'd desire
Can quench this raging, pleasing fire

(Lucasta's World.)


Gentle as chaines that honour binde,
More faithfull then an Hebrew Jew,
But as the divel not halfe so true.

(The Apostacy of One, and But One Lady.)


Amyntor, a profounder sea, I fear,
Hath swallow'd me, where now
My armes do row

(Amyntor from Beyond the Sea to Alexis.)


From thy tempestuous earth,
Where blood and dearth
Raigne 'stead of kings, agen

Wafte thy selfe over, and lest storms from far
Arise, bring in our sight
The seas delight,
Lucasta, that bright northerne star.

(Amyntor from Beyond the Sea to Alexis.)


From the dire monument of thy black roome,
Wher now that vestal flame thou dost intombe,
As in the inmost cell of all earths wombe.

(Calling Lucasta from Her Retirement.)


Arise and climbe our whitest, highest hill;
There your sad thoughts with joy and wonder fill,
And see seas calme as earth, earth as your will.

(Calling Lucasta from Her Retirement.)


Shrill trumpets doe only sound to eate,
Artillery hath loaden ev'ry dish with meate,
And drums at ev'ry health alarmes beate.

(Calling Lucasta from Her Retirement.)


Trees borrow tongues, waters in accents fall,
The aire doth sing, and fire is musicall.

(Calling Lucasta from Her Retirement.)


Up with the jolly bird of light
(Amarantha.)


Faire Amarantha from her bed
Ashamed starts, and rises red

(Amarantha.)


By nature in sate close and free,
As the just bark unto the tree

(Amarantha.)


No cabinets with curious washes,
Bladders and perfumed plashes;
No venome--temper'd water's here,
Mercury is banished this sphere:

(Amarantha.)


So like the Provance rose she walkt,
Flowered with blush, with verdure stalkt;
Th'officious wind her loose hayre curles,
The dewe her happy linnen purles

(Amarantha.)


If ever earth show'd all her store,
View her discolourd budding floor;

(Amarantha.)


Now the rich robed Tulip who,
Clad all in tissue close, doth woe
Her (sweet to th'eye but smelling sower),
She gathers to adorn her bower.

(Amarantha.)


And now the sun doth higher rise,
Our Flora to the meadow hies:
The poore distressed heifers low,
And as sh'approacheth gently bow,
Begging her charitable leasure
To strip them of their milkie treasure.

(Amarantha.)


Garnisht with gems of unset fruit,
Supply'd still with a self recruit;
Her bosom wrought with pretty eyes
Of never-planted Strawberries;

(Amarantha.)


And as againe her arms oth'ground
Spread pillows for hear head...

(Amarantha.)


Ye blew-flam'd daughters oth'abysse;
Bring all your snakes, here let them hisse;

(Amarantha.)


(To show our wound is half to heale),

(Amarantha.)


Imbark thee in the lawrell tree,
And a new Phebus follows thee,
Who, 'stead of all his burning rayes,
Will strive to catch thee with his layes;

(Amarantha.)


But not untill those heavy crimes
She hath kis'd off a thousand times,
Who not contented with this pain,
Doth threaten to offend again.

(Amarantha.)


Now walks she to her bow'r to dine
Under a shade of Eglantine,
Upon a dish of Natures cheere
Which both grew, drest and serv'd up the there:

(Amarantha.)


If in me anger, or disdaine
In you, or both, made me refraine
From th' noble intercourse of verse,
That only vertuous thoughts rehearse;
Then, chaste Ellinda, might you feare
The sacred vowes that I did sweare.

(To Ellinda, That Lately I Have Not Written.)


Thou snowy farme with thy five tenements!
Tell thy white mistris here was one,
That call'd to pay his dayly rents;

(Ellinda's Glove./Sonnet.)


For cherries plenty, and for croans
Enough for fifty, was there more on's;
For elles of beere, flutes of canary,
That well did wash downe pasties-Mary;
For peason, chickens, sawces high,
Pig, and the widdow-venson-pye;

(Being Treated./To Ellinda.)


Such a fate rules over me,
That I glory when I languish

(To Ellinda./Vpon His Late Recovery. A Paradox.)


And as men in hospitals,
That are maim'd, are lodg'd and dined

(To Ellinda./Vpon His Late Recovery. A Paradox.)


Chloe, behold! Our fate's the same.
Or make me cinders too, or quench his flame.

(To Chloe, Courting Her for His Friend.)


The Us'rer heaps unto his store
By seeing others praise it more;
Who not for gaine or want doth covet,
But, 'cause another loves, doth love it

(To Chloe, Courting Her for His Friend.)


I.
See! with what constant motion
Even and glorious, as the sunne,
Grataina steeres that noble frame,
Soft as her breast, sweet as her voyce,
That gave each winding law and poyze,
And swifter then the wings of Fame.

II.
She beat the happy pavement
By such a starre-made firmament,
Which now no more the roofe envies;
But swells up high with Atlas ev'n,
Bearing the brighter, nobler Heav'n,
And in her, all the Dieties.

III.
Each step trod out a lovers thought
And the ambitious hopes he brought,
Chain'd to her brave feet with such arts,
Such sweet command and gentle awe,
As such when she ceas'd, we sighing saw
The floore lay pav'd with broken hearts.

IV.
So did she move: so did she sing:
Like the harmonious spheres that bring
Unto their rounds their musick's ayd;
Which she performed such a way,
As all th'inamour'd world will say:
The Graces daunced, and Apollo play'd.

(Gratiana Dauncing and Singing.)


Blooming boy, and blossoming mayd,
May your faire sprigges be neere betray'd
To eating worm or fouler storme;
No serpent lurke to do them harme;
No sharpe frost cut, no North-winde teare,
The verdue of that fragrant hayre;
But may the sun and gentle weather,
When you are both growne ripe together,
Load you with fruit, such as your Father
From you with all the joyes doth gather:
And may you, when one branch is dead,
Graft such another in its stead,
Lasting thus ever in your prime,
'Till th'sithe is snatcht away from Time.

(Amyntor's Grove,/His Chloris, Arigo, and Gratiana. An Elogie.)


I.
Why shouldst thou sweare I am forsworn,
Since thine I vow'd to be?
Lady, it is already Morn,
And 'twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.

II.
Have I not lov'd thee much and long,
A tedious twelve moneths space?
I should all other beauties wrong,
And rob thee of a new imbrace;
Should I still dote upon thy face.

III.
Not but all joy in thy browne haire
In others may be found;
But I must search the black and faire,
Like skilfulle minerallists that sound
For treasure in un-plow'd-up ground.

IV.
Then if, when I have lov'd my round,
Thou prov'st the pleasant she;
With spoyles of meaner beauties crown'd,
I laden will returne to thee,
Ev'n sated with varietie.

(The Scrutinie.)


But viewing then, whereas she made
Not a distrest, but lively shade
OF ECCHO whom he had betrayed,
Now wanton, and ith' coole oth'Sunne
With her delight a hunting gone,
And thousands more, whom he had slaine;
To live and love, belov'd againe:
Ah! this is true divinity!

(Princesse Loysa Drawing.)


And he (whilst she his curles doth deck)
Hangs no where now, but on her neck.

(Princesse Loysa Drawing.)


There kneel'd ADONIS fresh as spring,
Gay as his youth, now offering
Herself those joyes with voice and hand,
Which first he could not understand.

(Princesse Loysa Drawing.)


Or that you take some small ease in your owne
Torments, to hear another sadly groane,
I were most happy in my paines...

(A Forsaken Lady to Her False Servant)


And I am candied ice...

(A Forsaken Lady to Her False Servant)


I.
Oh thou, that swing'st upon the waving eare
Of some well-filled oaten beard,
Drunk ev'ry night with a delicious teare
Dropt thee from Heav'n, where now th'art reard.

II.
The joyes of earth and ayre are thine intire,
That with thy feet and wings dost hop and flye;
And when thy poppy workes, thou dost retire
To thy carv'd acorn-bed to lye.

III.
Up with the day, the Sun thou welcomst then,
Sports in the guilt plats of his beames,
And all these merry dayes mak'st merry men,
Thy selfe, and melancholy streames.

IV.
But ah, the sickle! golden eares are cropt;
CERES and BACCHUS bid good-night;
Sharpe frosty fingers all your flowrs have topt,
And what sithes spar'd, winds shave off quite.

V.
Poore verdant foole! and now green ice, thy joys
Large and as lasting as thy peirch of grasse,
Bid us lay in 'gainst winter raine, and poize
Their flouds with an o'erflowing glasse.

VI.
Thou best of men and friends? we will create
A genuine summer in each others breast;
And spite of this cold Time and frosen Fate,
Thaw us a warme seate to our rest.

VII.
Our sacred harthes shall burne eternally
As vestal flames; the North-wind, he
Shall strike his frost-stretch'd winges, dissolve and flye
This Aetna in epitome.

VIII.
Dropping December shall come weeping in,
Bewayle th'usurping of his raigne;
But when in show'rs of old Greeke we beginne,
Shall crie, he hath his crowne againe!

IX.
Night as cleare Hesper shall our tapers whip
From the light casements, where we play,
And the darke hagge from her black mantle strip,
And sticke there everlasting day.

X.
Thus richer then untempted kings are we,
That asking nothing, nothing need:
Though lord of all what seas imbrace, yet he
That wants himselfe, is poore indeed.

(The Grassehopper.)


Mingle your steppes with flowers as you goe

(An Elegie./On the Death of Mrs. Cassandra Cotton, Only Sister to Mr. C. Cotton.)


And, lasting as their smiles, dig you a roome,
Where practise the probation of your tombe
With ever-bended knees and piercing pray’r,
Smooth the rough passe through craggy earth to ay’r

(An Elegie./On the Death of Mrs. Cassandra Cotton, Only Sister to Mr. C. Cotton.)


Rise and walk home; there groaning prostrate fall,
And celebrate your owne sad funerall:
For howsoe’re you move, may heare, or see,
YOU ARE MORE DEAD AND BURIED THEN SHEE.

(An Elegie./On the Death of Mrs. Cassandra Cotton, Only Sister to Mr. C. Cotton.)


Live then, pris’ners, uncontrol’d;
Drink oth’strong, the rich, the old,
Till wine too hath your wits in hold;
Then if still your jollitie
And throats are free—

Chorus
Tryumph in your bonds and paines,
And daunce to the music of your chaines.

(The Vintage to the Dungeon.)


Such and everlasting grace,
Such a beatifick face,
Incloysters here this narrow floore,
That possest all hearts before.

(On the Death of Mrs. Elizabeth Filmer.)


How it commands the face! So sweet a scorne
Never did HAPPY MISERY adorne!

(To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly:/On That Excellent Picture of His Majesty and the Duke of Yorke, Drawne By Him at Hampton-Court.)


Not as of old, when a rough hand did speake
A strong aspect, and a faire face, a weake;
When only a black beard cried villaine, and
By hieroglyphicks we could understand;
When chrystall typified in a white spot,
And the bright ruby was but one red blot;

(To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly:/On That Excellent Picture of His Majesty and the Duke of Yorke, Drawne By Him at Hampton-Court.)


Who ne’re ‘til now thinks himself slave and poor;
For though nought else, he had himself before.
He weepes at this faire chance, nor wil allow,
But that the diadem doth brand his brow,
And under-rates himselfe below mankinde,
Who first had lost his body, now his minde

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


Let me leape in againe! and by that fall
Bring me to my first woe, so cancel all

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


Informe my tongue in labour what to say,
And in what coyne or language to repay.
But you are silent as the ev’nings ayre,
When windes unto their hollow grots repaire.

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


When she walks forth, ye perfum’d wings oth’East,
Fan her, ‘til with the Sun she hastes the th’West

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


Slow Time, with woollen feet make thy soft pace,
And leave no tracks ith’snow of her pure face;
But when this vertue must needs fall, to rise
The brightest constellation in the skies;
When we in characters of fire shall reade,
How cleere she was alive, how spotless, dead.

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


Buffoones and theeves, ceasing to do ill,
Shall blush into a virgin-innocence,
And then woo others from the same offence

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


My wit shal be so wretched and so poore
That, ‘stead of praysing, I shal scandal her,
And leave, when with my purest art I’ve done,
Scarce the designe of what she is begunne:
Yet men shal send me home, admir’d, exact;
Proud, that I could from her so wel detract.

(The Lady A. L./My Asylum in a Great Extremity.)


The swelling admiral of the dread
Cold deepe, burnt in thy flames, oh faire!
Was not enough, but thou must lead
Bound, too, the Princesse of the aire?

(A Lady with a Falcon on Her Fist./To the Honourable My Cousin A[nne] L[ovelace.])


The lines each honest Englishmann may speake:
Yet not mistake his mother-tongue for Greeke

(A Prologue to the Scholars./A Comaedy Presented at the White Fryers.)


Nor would he now exchange his paine
For cloudes and goddesses againe

(Against the Love of Great Ones.)


Or ‘gender with the lightning? trye
The subtler flashes of her eye:
Poore SEMELE wel knew the same,
Who both imbrac’t her God and flame;

(Against the Love of Great Ones.)


If you meane HER, the very HER,
Abstracted from her caracter,
Uhappy boy! you may as soone
With fawning wanton with the Moone

(Against the Love of Great Ones.)


Like to the sordid insects sprung
From Father Sun and Mother Dung

(Against the Love of Great Ones.)


I.
When love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates;
And my divine ALTHEA brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lye tangled in her haire,
And fetterd to her eye,
The birds, that wanton in the aire,
Know no such liberty.

II.
When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying THAMES,
Our carelesse heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty griefe in wine we steepe,
When health’s and draughts go free,
Fishes, that tipple in the deepe,
Know no such libertie.

III.
When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King.
When I shall voice aloud, how good
He is, how great should be,
Inlarged winds, that curle the flood,
Know no such liberty.

IV.
Stone walls doe not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Mindes innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedome in my love,
And in my soule am free,
Angels alone that sore above
Enjoy such liberty.

(To Althea./From Prison.)


To his lovely bride, in love with scars,
Whose eyes wound deepe in peace, as doth his sword in wars

(Sonnet./To Generall Goring, After the Pacification at Berwicke. A la Chabot.)


Give me scorching heat, thy heat, dry Sun,
That to this payre I may drinke off an ocean

(Sonnet./To Generall Goring, After the Pacification at Berwicke. A la Chabot.)


Againe,
Thou witty creull wanton, now againe,
Through ev’ry veine,
Hurle all your lightning, and strike ev’ry dart,
Againe,
Before I feele this pleasing, pleasing paine.
I have no heart,
Nor can I live but sweetly murder’d with
So deare, so deare a smart.

(The Answer)


Doth laugh and sing at thy distresse;
Not out of hate to thy reliefe,
But joy t’enjoy thee, though in griefe.

(A Guiltlesse Lady Imprisoned: After Penanced.)


IV.
And play about thy wanton wrist,
As if in them thou so wert drest;
But if too rough, too hard they presse,
Oh, they but closely, closely kisse.

V.
And as thy bare feet blesse the way,
The people doe not mock, but pray,
And call thee, as amas’d they run
Instead of prostitute, a nun.

(A Guiltlesse Lady Imprisoned: After Penanced.)


Then from thy firme selfe never swerve;
Teares fate the griefe that they should sterve

(To His Deare Brother Colonel F. L./Immoderately Mourning My Brothers Untimely Death at Carmarthen.)


This is the prittiest motion:
Madam, th'alarums of a drumme
That cals your lord, set to your cries,
To mine are sacred symphonies.

What, though 'tis said I have a voice;
I know 'tis but that hollow noise
Which (as it through my pipe doth speed)
Bitterns do carol through a reed;
In the same key with monkeys jiggs,
Or dirges of proscribed piggs,
Or the soft Serenades above
In calme of night, when cats make love.

Was ever such a consort seen!
Fourscore and fourteen with forteen?
Yet sooner they'll agree, one paire,
Then we in our spring-winter aire;
They may imbrace, sigh, kiss, the rest:
Our breath knows nought but east and west.

Thus have I heard to childrens cries
The faire nurse still such lullabies,
That, well all sayd (for what there lay),
The pleasure did the sorrow pay.

Sure ther's another way to save
Your phansie, madam; that's to have
(Tis but a petitioning kinde fate)
The organs set to Bilingsgate,
Where they to that soft murm'ring quire
Shall teach you all you can admire!
Or do but heare, how love-bang Kate
In pantry darke for freage of mate,
With edge of steele the square wood shapes,
And DIDO to it chaunts or scrapes.
The merry Phaeton oth'carre
You'l vow makes a melodious jarre;
Sweeter and sweeter whisleth He
To un-annointed axel-tree;
Such swift notes he and 's wheels do run;
For me, I yeeld him Phaebus son.
Say, faire Comandres, can it be
You should ordaine a mutinie?
For where I howle, all accents fall,
As kings hanangues, to one and all.

Ulisses art is now withstood:
You ravish both with sweet and good;
Saint Syren, sing, for I dare heare,
But when I ope', oh, stop your eare.

Far lesse be't aemulation
To passe me, or in trill or tone,
Like the thin throat of Philomel,
And the smart lute who should excell,
As if her soft cords should begin,
And strive for sweetnes with the pin.

Yet can I musick too; but such
As is beyond all voice or touch;
My minde can in faire order chime,
Whilst my true heart still beats the time;
My soule['s] so full of harmonie,
That it with all parts can agree;
If you winde up to the highest fret,
It shall descend an eight from it,
And when you shall vouchsafe to fall,
Sixteene above you it shall call,
And yet, so dis-assenting one,
They both shall meet in unison.

Come then, bright cherubin, begin!
My loudest musick is within.
Take all notes with your skillful eyes;
Hearke, if mine do not sympathise!
Sound all my thoughts, and see exprest
The tablature of my large brest;
Then you'l admit, that I too can
Musick above dead sounds of man;
Such as alone doth blesse the spheres,
No to be reacht with humane eares.

(To a Lady That Desired Me I Would Beare My Part with Her in a Song.)


Now fire upon that everlasting life!...

(Valiant Love.)


Cheape then are pearle-imbroderies,
That not adorne, but cloud thy wast;
Thou shalt be cloath'd above all prise,
If thou wilt promise me imbrac't.
Wee'l ransack neither chest nor shelfe:
Ill cover thee with mine owne selfe.

(The Faire Begger.)


Or wouldst thou have thy life a martyrdom?
Dye in the act of thy religion,
Fit, excellently, innocently good

(An Elegie./Princesse Katherine [[An.3]] Borne, Christened, Buried, in One Day.)


Or, in your journey towards heav'n, say,
Tooke you the world a little in your may?
Saw'st and dislik'st its vaine pompe, then didst flye
Up for eternall glories to the skye?

(An Elegie./Princesse Katherine [[An.3]] Borne, Christened, Buried, in One Day.)


And teach your soules new mirth, such as may be
Worthy this birth-day to divinity.

(An Elegie./Princesse Katherine [[An.3]] Borne, Christened, Buried, in One Day.)


Hearke, reader! wilt be learn'd ith'warres?
A gen'rall in a gowne?

(To My Truely Valiant, Learned Friend; Who in His Booke/Resolv'd the Art Gladiatory into the Mathematicks.)


Heare ye, foul speakers, that pronounce the aire
Of stewes and shores, I will informe you where
And how to cloath aright your wanton wit,
Without her nasty bawd attending it:
View here a loose thought sayd with such a grace,
Minerva might have spoke in Venus face;
So well disguis'd, that 'twas conceiv'd by none
But Cupid had Diana's linnen on;
And all his naked parts so vail'd, th'expresse
The shape with clowding the uncomlinesse;
That if this Reformation, which we
Receiv'd, had not been buried with thee,
The stage (as this worke) might have liv'd and lov'd
Her lines, the austere Skarlet had approv'd;
And th'actors wisely been from that offence
As cleare, as they are now from audience.

(To Fletcher Reviv'd.)


LUCASTA, frown, and let me die,
But smile, and see, I live;
The sad indifference of your eye
Both kills and doth reprieve.
You hide our fate within its screen;
We feel our judgment, ere we hear.
So in one picture I have seen
An angel here, the devil's there.

(To Lvcasta./Her Reserved Looks.)


Night! loathed jaylor of the lock'd up sun,
And tyrant-turnkey on committed day,
Bright eyes lye fettered in thy dungeon,
And Heaven it self doth thy dark wards obey.
Thou dost arise our living hell;
With thee groans, terrors, furies dwell;
Until LUCASTA doth awake,

(Night./To Lucasta.)


I.
Introth, I do my self perswade,
That the wild boy is grown a man,
And all his childishnesse off laid,
E're since LUCASTA did his fires fan;
H'has left his apish jigs,
And whipping hearts like gigs:
For t'other day I heard him swear,
That beauty should be crown'd in honours chair.

II.
With what a true and heavenly state
He doth his glorious darts dispence,
Now cleans'd from falsehood, blood and hate,
And newly tipt with innocene!
Love Justice is become,
And doth the cruel doome;
Reversed is the old decree;
Behold! he sits inthron'd with majestie.

III.
Inthroned in LUCASTA'S eye,
He doth our faith and hearts surved;
Then measures them by sympathy,
And each to th'others breast convey;
Whilst to his altars now
The frozen vestals bow,
And strickt Diana too doth go
A-hunting with his fear'd, exchanged bow.

IV.
Th'imbracing seas and ambient air
Now in his holy fires burn;
Fish couple, birds and beasts in pair
Do their own sacrifices turn.
This is a miracle,
That might religion swell;
But she, that these and their god awes,
Her crowned self submits to her own laws.

(Love Inthron'd./Ode.)


I.
Twas not for some calm blessing to deceive,
Thou didst thy polish'd hands in shagg'd fur weave;
It were no blessing thus obtain'd;
Thou rather would'st a curse have gain'd,
Then let thy warm driven snow be ever stain'd.

II.
Not that you feared the discolo'ring cold
Might alchymize their silver into gold;
Nor could your ten white nuns so sin,
That you should thus pennance them in,
Each in her coarse hair smock of discipline.

III.
Nor, Hero-like who, on their crest still wore
A lyon, panther, leopard, or a bore,
To looke their enemies in their herse,
Thou would'st thy hand should deeper pierce,
And, in its softness rough, appear more fierce.

IV.
No, no LUCASTA, destiny decreed,
That beasts to thee a sacrifice should bleed,
And strip themselves to make you gay:
For ne'r yet herald did display
A coat, where SABLES upon ERMIN lay.

V.
This for lay-lovers, that must stand at dore,
Salute the threshold, and admire no more;
But I, in my invention tough,
Rate not this outward bliss enough,
But still contemplate must the hidden muffe.

(Her Muffe.)


Like to the sent'nel stars, I watch all night;
For still the grand round of your light
And glorious breast
Awake in me an east;
Nor will my rolling eyes ere know a west.

(To Lucasta.)


Look up then, miserable ant, and spie
Thy fatal foes, for breaking of their law,
Hov'ring above thee:...

(The Ant.)


I.
Strive not, vain lover, to be fine;
Thy silk's the silk-worm's, and not thine:
You lessen to a fly your mistriss' thought,
To think it may be in a cobweb caught.
What, though her thin transparent lawn
Thy heart in a strong net hath drawn:
Not all of arms the god of fire ere made
Can the soft bulwarks of nak'd love invade.

II.
Be truly fine, then, and yourself dress
In her fair soul's immac'late glass.
Then by reflection you may have the bliss
Perhaps to see what a true fineness is;
When all your gawderies will fit
Those only that are poor in wit.
She that a clinquant outside doth adore,
Dotes on a gilded statue and no more.

(Song.)


Now tell me, thou fair cripple,
That dumb canst scarcely see
Th'almightinesse of tipple,
And th'ods 'twixt thee and thee,
What of Elizium's missing,
Still drinking and still kissing;
Adoring plump October;
Lord! what is man, and sober?

(A Loose Saraband.)


Faire Princesse of the spacious air,
That hast vouchsaf'd acquaintance here,
With us are quarter'd below stairs,
That can reach heav'n with nought by pray'rs;
Who, when our activ'st wings we try,
Advance a foot into the sky.

(The Falcon.)


I.
In the nativity of time,
Chloris! it was not thought a crime
In direct Hebrew for to woe.
Now wee make love , as all on fire,
Ring retrograde our lowd desire,
And court in English backward too.

II.
Thrice happy was that golden age,
When complement was contru'd rage,
And fine words in the center hid;
When cursed NO stain'd no maid's blisse,
And all discourse was summ'd in YES,
And nought forbad, but to forbid.

III.
Love then unstinted love did sip,
And cherries pluck'd fresh from the lip,
on cheeks and roses free he fed;
Lasses, like Autumne plums, did drop,
And lad indifferently did drop
A flower and a maiden-head.

IV.
Then unconfined each did tipple
Wind from the bunch, milk from the nipple;
Paps tractable as udders were.
Then equally the wholesome jellies
Were squeez'd from olive-trees and bellies:
Nor suits of trespasse did they fear.

V.
A fragrant bank of strawberries,
Diaper'd with violets' eyes,
Was table, table-cloth and faire;
No palace to the clouds did swell,
Each humble princesse then did dwell
In the Piazza of her hair.

VI.
Both broken faith and th'cause of it,
All-damning gold, was damn'd to th'pit;
Their troth seal'd with a clasp and kisse,
Lasted until that extreem day,
In which they smil'd their souls away,
And in each other breath'd new blisse.

VII.
Because no fault, there was no tear;
No grone did grate the granting ear,
No false foul breath, their del'cat smell.
No serpant kiss poyson'd the tast,
Each touch was naturally chast,
And their mere Sense a Miracle.

VIII.
Naked as their own innocence,
And unembroyder'd from offence,
They went, above poor riches, gay;
On softer than the cignet's down,
In beds they tumbled off their own:
For each within the other lay.

IX.
Thus did they live: thus did they love,
Repeating only joyes above,
And angels were but with cloathes on,
Which they would put off cheerfully,
To bathe them in the Galaxie,
Then gird them with the heavenly zone.

X.
Now, Chloris! miserably crave
The offer'd blisse you would not have,
Which evermore I must deny:
Whilst ravish'd with these noble dreams,
And crowned with mine own soft beams,
Injoying of my self I lye.

(Love Made in the First Age./To Chloris.)


For since thy birth gave thee no beauty, know,
No poets pencil must or can do so.

(Ode.)


He proffers Jove a back caresse,
And all his love in the anitpodes.

(Cupid Far Gone.)


Was it not better once to play
I'th'light of a majestick ray,
Where, though too neer and bold, the fire
Might sindge thy upper down attire

(Cupid Far Gone.)


Fair as original light first from the chaos shot,
When day in virgin-beams triumph'd, and night was not

(Female Glory.)


Whilst the gay girl, as was her fate,
Doth wanton and luxuriate

(The Toad and Spyder.)


Preventing rival of the day,
Th'art up and openest thy ray;
And ere the morn cradles the moon,
Th'art broke into a beauteous noon.
Then, when the Sun sups in the deep,
Thy silver horns e're Cinthia's peep;
And thou, from thine own liquid bed,
New Phoebus, heav'st thy pleasant head.

(The Snayl.)


And when thou art to progress bent,
Thou mov'st thy self and tenement,
As warlike Scythians travayl'd, you
Remove your men and city too

(The Snayl.)


But as at Meccha's tombe, the devout blind
Pilgrim (great husband of his sight and mind)
Pays to no other object this chast prise,
Then with hot earth anoynts our both his eyes:
So having seen your dazling glories store,
It is enough, and sin for to see more.

(The Triumphs of Philamore and Amoret./To the Noblest of Our Youth and Best of Friends, Charles Cotton, Esquire./Being at Berisford, at His House in Staffordshire. From London./A Poem.)


But whether am I hurl'd? ho! back! awake
From thy glad trance: to thine old sorrow take!
Thus, after view of all the Indies store,
The slave returns unto his chain and oar;
Thus poets, who all night in blest heav'ns dwell,
Are call'd next morn to their true living hell;
So I unthrifty, to myself untrue,
Rise cloath'd with real wants, 'cause wanting you,
And what substantial riches I possesse,
I must to these unvalued dreams confesse.

(The Triumphs of Philamore and Amoret./To the Noblest of Our Youth and Best of Friends, Charles Cotton, Esquire./Being at Berisford, at His House in Staffordshire. From London./A Poem.)


Draw all your sails in quickly, though no storm
Threaten your ruine with a sad alarm;
For tell me how they differ, tell me, pray,
A cloudy tempest and a too fair day?

(Advice to My Best Brother,/Coll: Francis Lovelace.)


And the pale frights, the pain, and fears of hell
First from your sullen melancholy fell.

(Peinture./A Panegyrick to the Best Picture of Friendship, Mr. Pet. Lilly.)


When beauty once thy vertuous paint hath on,
Age needs not call her to vermillion;
Her beams nere shed or change like th'hair of day,
She scattered fresh her everlasting ray.

(Peinture./A Panegyrick to the Best Picture of Friendship, Mr. Pet. Lilly.)


Where then, when all the world pays its respect,
Lies our transalpine barbarous neglect?

(Peinture./A Panegyrick to the Best Picture of Friendship, Mr. Pet. Lilly.)


Whilst he, who in seven languages gave law,
And always, like the Sun, his subjects saw

(Peinture./A Panegyrick to the Best Picture of Friendship, Mr. Pet. Lilly.)


A beauteous offspring is shot forth, not born

(An Anniversary of the Hymeneals of My Noble Kinsman,/Tho. Stanley, Esquire.)


And now me thinks we ape Augustus state,
So ugly we his high worth imitate,
Monkey his godlike glories; so that we
Keep light and form with such deformitie,
As I have seen an arrogant baboon
With a small piece of glasse zany the sun.
/Rome to her bard, who did her battails sing,
Indifferent gave to poet and to king;
With the same lawrells were his temples fraught,
Who best had written, and who best had fought

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


You that do suck for thirst your black quil's blood,
And chaw your labour'd papers for your food,
I will inform you how and what to praise,
Then skin y'in satin as young Lovelace plaies.
Beware, as you would your fierce guests, your lice,
To strip the cloath of gold from cherish'd vice;
Rather stand off with awe and reverend fear,
Hang a poetick pendant in her ear

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


It is a mortal errour, you must know,
Of any to speak good, if he be so.

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


Yet there belongs a sweetnesse, softnesse too,
Which you must pay, but first, pray, know to who.
There is a creature, (if I may so call
That unto which they do all prostrate fall)
Term'd mistress, when they'r angry; but, pleas'd high,
It is a princesse, saint, divinity.
To this they sacrifice the whole days light,
Then lye with their devotion all light,
Then lye with their devotion all nightl
For this you are to dive to the abysse,
And rob for pearl the closet of some fish.
Arabia and Sabaea you must strip
Of all their sweets, for to supply her lip

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


Of minced verse a miserable pye.

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


O more then conqu'ror of the world, great Rome!
Thy heroes did with gentleness or'e come
Thy foes themselves, but one another first,
Whilst envy script alone was left, and burst.

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


If it be sacriledge for to profane
Their holy ashes, what is't then their flame?
He does that wrong unweeting or in ire,
As if one should put out the vestal fire.

[unweeting = unwitting] (On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


There is not in my mind one sullen fate
Of old, but is concentrated in our state:
Vandall ore-runners, Goths in literature:
Ploughmen that would Parnassus new-manure;
Ringers of verse that all-in-chime,
And toll the changes upon every rime.

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


These scorpions, with which we have to do,
Are fiends, not only small but deadly too.

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)


Now as her self a poem she doth dresse.
And curls a line, as she would do a tresse;
Powders a sonnet as she does her hair,
Then prostitutes them both to publick aire.
Nor is't enough, that they their faces blind
With a false dye; but they must paint their mind,
In meeter scold, and in scann'd order brawl

(On Sanazar's Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets/By the Clarissimi of Venice, For Composing an Eligiack Hexastick of the City./A Satyre.)

Heark! how the moving chords temper our brain,
As when Apollo serenades the main,
Old Ocean smooths his sullen furrow’d front,
And Nereids do glide soft measures on’t;
Whilst th’air puts on its sleekest, smoothest face,
And each doth turn the others looking-glasse;
So by the sinewy lyre now strook we see
Into soft calms all storm of poesie,
And former thundering and lightning lines,
And verse now in its native luster shines.

(Commendatory Verses,/Prefixed to Various Publications Between 1652 and 1657./To My Dear Friend Mr. E[ldred] R[evett]./On His Poems Moral and Divine.)


But all these flour’shing hiews, with which I die
Thy virgin paper, now are vain as I:
For ‘bove the poets Heav’n th’art taught to shine
And move, as in thy proper crystalline;
Whence that mole-hill Parnassus thou dost view,
And us small ants there dabbling in its dew

(Commendatory Verses,/Prefixed to Various Publications Between 1652 and 1657./To My Dear Friend Mr. E[ldred] R[evett]./On His Poems Moral and Divine.)


Obscured with the false fires of his sceme,
Not half those souls are lightned by this theme.

(On the Best, Last, and Only Remaining Comedy/Of Mr. Fletcher./The Wild Goose Chase.)


Though you hold out your selves, he doth commit
In this a sacred treason in your wit;
Although in poems desperately stout,
Give up: this overture must buy you out.

(On the Best, Last, and Only Remaining Comedy/Of Mr. Fletcher./The Wild Goose Chase.)


For singing, troth, is but in tune to speak

(To My Noble Kinsman Thomas Stanley, Esq./On His Lyrick Poems Composed By Mr. John Gamble.)


Tis not from cheap thanks thinly to repay
Th’immortal grove of thy fair-order’d bay
Thou planted’st round my humble fane, that I
Stick on thy hearse this sprig of Elegie:
Nor that your soul so fast was link’d in me,
That now I’ve both, since’t has forsaken thee:
That thus I stand a Swisse before thy gate,
And dare, for such another, time and fate.

(To the Genius of Mr. John Hall./On His Exact Translation of Hierocles/His Comment Upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras.)


Let others dream thy shadow wandering strays
In th’Elizian mazes hid with bays;
Or that, snatcht up in th’upper reason,
‘Tis kindled there a constellation;
I have inform’d me, and declare with ease
THY SOUL IS FLED INTO HIEROCLES.

(To the Genius of Mr. John Hall./On His Exact Translation of Hierocles/His Comment Upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras.)



I cannot tell who loves the skeleton
Of a poor marmoset, naught but bone, bone.
Give me a nakedness with her clothes on.

Such whose white satin upper coat of skin,
Cut upon velvet rich incarnadine,
Has yet a body (and a flesh) within.

Sure it is meant good husbandry in men
Who do incorporate with airy lean,
T’repair their sides, and get their rib again.

Hard hap unto that huntsman that decrees
Fat joys for all his sweat, whenas he sees,
After his ‘say, nought but his keeper’s fees.

Then Love, I beg, when next thou tak’st thy bow,
Thy angry shafts, and dost heart-chasing go,
Pass rascal deer, strike me the largest doe.

(La Bella Bona Roba, * not included in Kessinger edition.)

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Food & Feast in Tudor England, Alison Sim

Food & Feast in Tudor England, Alison SIm, Sutton Publishing, Gloucestershire, 1997

In the late sixteenth century…you would have expected a far greater range of items to be made out of silver. This was owing partly to the greater wealth enjoyed by certain people at the time and partly to the fact that new bullion was pouring into Europe from South America… [But] Even at the end of the sixteenth century silver was beyond the reach of most people. 97

The sixteenth century was certainly no golden age. Certain classes in society did indeed flourish but it was a bad time for those at the bottom who found their standard of living decreasing. One estimate, based on inventories, is that by the middle of the sixteenth century about half of the households in England were using pewter, which meant of course that about half the population could not afford it. 98

…as pewter is softer than silver, hardly any of this tableware survives today. It was also quite usual to take your old, worn pewter back to the pewterer to be melted… 98

Once you had taken stock of your host’s tableware it was time to start looking at the items provided at your own place. The first thing to look out for was the ceremonial salt cellar…little bowls…purely to ensure that all the diners had salt…would stand by the place of the most important diner…The next item to study was your drinking vessel. If your cup had been provided with a cover it was another sign your host saw you as someone worth honouring. 100

William Harrison was somewhat scathing of this fashion for glass: ‘It is a world to see in these our days, wherein gold and silver most aboundeth, how that our gentility, as loathing those metals (because of their plenty), do now generally choose rather the Venice glasses, both for our wine and beer, than any of those metals or stone wherein beforetime we have been accustomed to drink…’ 101

Forks were very rare in England in the sixteenth century. In the inventory of the royal jewel house taken in 1574 there were only thirteen silver forks. They were used for serving sticky items, especially sweetmeats, or for helping to steady meat while it was being carved, rather than for eating. Eating with a fork was an Italian fashion which did not reach England until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 102

Though forks were foreign, spoons most definitely were not. They held a special place for the Tudor as prized personal possessions and were made in a bewilderingly wide range of styles. 102-103

Relatively large numbers of spoons survive, partly because they contained only about 4 oz of silver each and so were not really worth much as scrap. They also survived because they had strong sentimental value to the Tudors. As personal items they were valued in much the same way that we value our personal items of jewelry today. They were often left in wills for this reason… 103

Eating knives looked rather like a modern cooking knife, with a leaf-shaped blade. The leaf shape gave the knife a point which was useful for spearing food out of serving dishes. It was, however, the height of bad manners to put y our knife in your mouth, just as it still is today. The food would have been removed from the knife and put into the mouth with your fingers. 103-104.

Grand households did own sets of knives for guests to use but it was more usual to have to bring your own knife…etiquette books remind diners that it is their duty to see that their knife is in a fit condition to bring to a table…clean and sharp. 104

Guests’ hands were washed before and after the meal and also between courses, often in scented water. 104

You were expected to use the napkin, as the courtesy books are full of reminders to keep yourself clean. This was particularly important as you might be sharing your cup with the person sitting next to you, and they would hardly want your grease and crumbs… 107

More good advice was to ‘Lay not thy elbow nor they fist/Upon the table whilst thou eat’st’, as it was usual to eat off trestle tables, which might not be very stable. 107

For most Tudors the correct way to drink was to take the cup in both hands…In very well-to-do circles…drinking vessels would not be left on the table but would be called for only when wanted. 107

Most Tudors ate out of communal dishes…It was only very grand diners who could expect their own serving dishes… 108

You would take meat from the communal dish, dip it into one of the sauces provided…and then put the piece into your mouth. 108

Eating from the common dishes was not a free-for-all…the most important person…would help themselves first, and so on through the group of four. 109

…it was the height of bad manners to have your dog with you at meal times. 109

…some things were allowed which would shock the modern diner. Spitting was certainly permitted, although it had to be done discreetly…You were also advised to wipe your hand on your clothes if you had to blow your nose so that other people did not have to look at the result. 110

The greatest of the feasts celebrated was Christmas. This, of course, covered twelve days, but unlike the modern Christmas the celebrations did not begin until Christmas Day itself. Advent was mostly a time of fasting…The two most celebrated days of Christmas were New Year and the final day of the celebration, Twelfth Night. 114

There were different days when certain sections of society were allowed an unusual degree of freedom. Children, for example, had their day on 6 December, St Nicholas’s day. 115

Christmas, then as now, had a variety of dishes associated with it. The first was the boar’s head, which formed the centerpiece of the Christmas Day meal. It was garnished with rosemary and bay…lower down society…[there was no] centerpiece the way the boar’s head was in grander circles. 115

One important item associated with Twelfth Night was the Twelfth cake. This was a fruitcake into which an object or objects might be baked…whoever found the item in their piece of cake became…host and hostess for the evening’s entertainments…The exact nature of the cake, despite it being such an important part of Twelfth Night, remains something of a mystery. Very likely it contained dried fruit, but the earliest evidence comes from a tract printed in Geneva in 1620 which lists the main ingredients as flour, honey, ginger, and pepper. 116

Another tradition associated with Christmas was that of wassailing. This was the remains of old fertility rights, when a toast would be drunk to fruit trees in the hope of making them produce a good crop in the following year. 116

May Day...citizens of London ‘going into the Woods and Meadows to divert themselves’. It was a day associated with fertility rights so the games in the woods were not necessarily innocent, although more blameless community sports and dancing were also usual. In any case, the revellers would be welcomed home with cakes and cream. Cream was a great luxury for ordinary people… 118

Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Night…start of the agricultural year. Shrovetide, or Shrove Tuesday, when fritters and pancakes were the order of the day. 119

The Lent fast in particular was really born of necessity. Late spring was the time when the last year’s store of food would have been running low…For the wealthy, Lent was a time for fasting but in relative terms. Meat, milk and eggs might be forbidden but…recipe books of the time are full of ways of providing luxurious meals despite the restrictions. Milk could be replaced with almond milk, made from ground almonds mixed with anything from white wine to fish broth. A variety of luxurious fish dishes replaced the meat dishes. 120

All Fridays and Saturdays were also fast days, although restrictions were more relaxed than they were during Lent. On ordinary Fridays outside Lent it seems to have been only meat that was not allowed…The people who must have enjoyed fish days least would have been those who had to eat stockfish. This was dried fish which was rock hard and had to be beaten with a wooden hammer and soaked in warm water for two hours before it could be eaten. 120

…potato, as it is the most famous of the vegetables introduced into England at the time. In the 1622 edition of Herball two types of potato are included…’potatoes’, which is a sweet potato and is referred to by John Parkinson as a Spanish potato…The other variety is the ‘Virginia potato, which is the one familiar to us today…Potatoes were not to become the ordinary food of the common people until the eighteenth century…Wealthier people’s meals in the Middle Ages often ended with a compost, which was a dish of root vegetables and fruit, such as pears, mixed up in a kind of sweet and sour sauce. So the idea of putting root vegetables in sugar was a very old one. 125-6

The tomato was another famous new introduction of the time, though again it was not commonly eaten until much later, probably the nineteenth century. 126

Easter was the time to eat veal and bacon, and Michaelmas (29 December), the time to eat fresh herrings and also ‘fatted crones’, the old female sheep who were past their prime and ready for the pot. Christmas was the only time when it was right to ‘play and make good cheere’ with a good conscience and enjoy the best food that you had. The rest of the year you always had to make the most of what was in season. 127

Since the Middle Ages kings had lived on the move, not only to check up on what was happening in the various regions of their realm but also to show themselves off. They were well aware of how much a personal visit from the king could boost their popularity—or at least bring home the fact that the sovereign was a force to be reckoned with. 129

Naturally a tournament formed part of the entertainments. By the sixteenth century tournaments were basically an occasion for a very elaborate display of wealth. They also gave the aristocracy the chance to show off their military skills, but the aim was most definitely not to kill the opponent. 131

In the sixteenth century the word ‘banquet’ had two meanings. The first was the one we use today…The second…meant a dessert course consisting of various luxury foods, often eaten in a specially constructed banqueting house. The idea of the dessert course banquet had developed from feasts held by the wealthy and important in the Middle Ages. Often the top table at a feast was served with spiced wine, wafers and various spices at the end of a meal to aid digestion, and so as to finish on a suitably luxurious note. At this stage the hall would be in the process of being cleared of the trestle tables used for dining, so it made sense to go into another, more comfortable room for this course. Thus began the tradition of eating what later became the dessert course in a different room, together with the tradition that it was only served to a small selection of the grander guests, rather than to everyone who had been invited to a feast. 135

Renaissance gardens were supposed to delight the senses, challenge the intellect and refresh the spirit…Sixteenth century Italian gardens were very elaborate and the garden doubtless owed a great deal more to art than nature. 141-2

According to sixteenth-century medical opinion, the whole menu at a banquet was designed to inflame lust…In addition to wine, ‘strong waters’, or spirits, were served. These were spirits of wine distilled over various fruits, flowers and so on…aniseed, pine kernels and candied eringo roots (sea-holly)…Also considered aphrodisiacs were the various marmalades…figs… ‘Kissing comfits’ made of sugarpaste appear in several recipe books of the time, while ‘spannish paps’, made of sweetened cream, might also appear at the table. ‘Paps’ was the sixteenth-century word for breasts. The paps were served in the shape of little mounds, hence their name…This kind of banquet usually happened after the guests had already eaten a large meal. Therefore it was not intended that the guests should come to the table hungry. The banquet was supposed to tempt what was already a rather jaded palette, and people would pick at it in the way we might pick at chocolates or mints offered to us after a large meal at a dinner party…One reason why the fashion for this type of banquet food faded by the eighteenth century was that large-scale sugar plantations had brought the price down to such an extent that it was no longer an exclusive item. 146-151

A whole range of fancy biscuits and breads was also associated with banquets. These included gingerbreads, which were rather different from the type we are familiar with today. Tudor gingerbread was much heavier than modern ginger sponge cake. It was far more like a biscuit…Some of the biscuits and biscuit breads which were served were spiced, but others were deliberately left quite bland so that they would compliment all the other rich food. The blander biscuits were also useful for dipping into the flavoured creams and butters. 160-161