Hecatomb Mistress
(I am unsure if the choice of the illustration here is appropriate. The painting is obviously meant to be serious, while Cleveland’s Hecatomb to his Mistress is a piece of fairly preposterous farce).
The Hecatomb to his Mistress.
Be dumb, you beggars of the rhyming trade,
Geld your loose wits and let your Muse be spayed.
Charge not the parish with the bastard phrase
Of balm, elixir, both the Indias,
Of shrine, saint, sacrilege, and such as these
Expressions common as your mistresses.
Hence, you fantastic postillers in song.
My text defeats your art, ties Nature’s tongue,
Scorns all her tinselled metaphors of pelf,
Illustrated by nothing but herself.
As spiders travel by their bowels spun
Into a thread, and, when the race is run,
Wind up their journey in a living clew,
So is it with my poetry and you.
From your own essence must I first untwine,
Then twist again each panegyric line.
Reach then a soaring quill that I may write,
As with a Jacob’s staff, to take her height.
Suppose an angel, darting through the air,
Should there encounter a religious prayer
Mounting to Heaven, that Intelligence
Should for a Sunday-suit thy breath condense
Into a body.–Let me crack a string
In venturing higher; were the note I sing
Above Heaven’s Ela, should I then decline,
And with a deep-mouthed gamut sound the line
From pole to pole, I could not reach her worth,
Nor find an epithet to set it forth.
Metals may blazon common beauties; she
Makes pearls and planets humble heraldry.
As, then, a purer substance is defined
But by a heap of negatives combined,
Ask what a spirit is, you’ll hear them cry
It hath no matter, no mortality:
So can I not define how sweet, how fair;
Only I say she ‘s not as others are.
For what perfections we to others grant,
It is her sole perfection to want.
All other forms seem in respect of thee
The almanac’s misshaped anatomy,
Where Aries head and face, Bull neck and throat,
The Scorpion gives the secrets, knees the Goat;
A brief of limbs foul as those beasts, or are
Their namesake signs in their strange character.
As the philosophers to every sense
Marry its object, yet with some dispense,
And grant them a polygamy with all,
And these their common sensibles they call:
So is ‘t with her who, stinted unto none,
Unites all senses in each action.
The same beam heats and lights; to see her well
Is both to hear and feel, to taste and smell.
For, can you want a palate in your eyes,
When each of hers contains a double prize,
Venus’s apple? Can your eyes want nose
When from each cheek buds forth a fragrant rose?
Or can your sight be deaf to such a quick
And well-tuned face, such moving rhetoric?
Doth not each look a flash of lightning feel
Which spares the body’s sheath, and melts the steel?
Thy soul must needs confess, or grant thy sense
Corrupted with the object’s excellence.
Sweet magic, which can make five senses lie
Conjured within the circle of an eye!
In whom, since all the five are intermixed,
Oh now that Scaliger would prove his sixt!
Thou man of mouth, that canst not name a she
Unless all Nature pay a subsidy,
Whose language is a tax, whose musk-cat verse
Voids nought but flowers, for thy Muse’s hearse
Fitter than Celia’s looks, who in a trice
Canst state the long disputed Paradise,
And (what Divines hunt with so cold a scent)
Canst in her bosom find it resident;
Now come aloft, come now, and breathe a vein,
And give some vent unto thy daring strain.
Say the astrologer who spells the stars,
In that fair alphabet reads peace and wars,
Mistakes his globe and in her brighter eye
Interprets Heaven’s physiognomy.
Call her the Metaphysics of her sex,
And say she tortures wits as quartans vex
Physicians; call her the square circle; say
She is the very rule of Algebra.
What e’er thou understand’st not, say ‘t of her,
For that ‘s the way to write her character.
Say this and more, and when thou hopest to raise
Thy fancy so as to inclose her praise–
Alas poor Gotham, with thy cuckoo-hedge!
Hyperboles are here but sacrilege.
Then roll up, Muse, what thou hast ravelled out,
Some comments clear not, but increase the doubt.
She that affords poor mortals not a glance
Of knowledge, but is known by ignorance;
She that commits a rape on every sense,
Whose breath can countermand a pestilence;
She that can strike the best invention dead
Till baffled poetry hangs down the head–
She, she it is that doth contain all bliss,
And makes the world but her periphrasis.
[_The Hecatomb to his Mistress._] (_1651_.) This
poem is perhaps the best text to prove (or endeavour to prove)
that Cleveland’s object was really burlesque.]
[Line: 1 you] ‘ye’ _1651_, _1653_.]
[Line: 2 _1651_, _1653_ read ‘the’ for ‘your’, and ‘splaid’:
‘spade’ _1677_. ‘Spay’ or ‘splay’ to destroy the reproductive
powers of a female.]
[Line: 3 the bastard] _1677_ again alters ‘the’ to ‘your’,
which does not seem good.]
[Line: 5 sacrilege] sacrifice _1677_.]
[Line: 6 your] their _1653_, &c.]
[Line: 7 postillers] The word means glossers or commentators
on Scripture, and has acquired in several languages a
contemptuous meaning from the frequently commonplace and
trivial character of such things. ‘ye fantastic’ _1653_.]
[Line: 9 _1651_, _1653_ have ‘his’ for ‘her’, and in the next
line ‘his self’ for ‘herself’. The poem is particularly badly
printed in this group, and I think the _1677_ editors, in
trying to mend it, have mistaken some places. Thus in …]
[Line: 22 They print ‘Would’ for ‘Should’. This may look
better at first; but I at least can make no real sense of it.
With ‘Should’ I can make some. The poet starts an extravagant
comparison in 19-21; continues it in ‘[suppose] that
Intelligence should’, &c.; finds it will not do, and breaks
it off with the parenthetical ‘Let me’ &c. To bring this out
I have inserted the –.]
[Line: 24 _1677_ ‘And venture’, with a full-stop at ‘higher’,
not so well; but in …]
[Line: 25 ‘_un_decline’ _1651_, _1653_, &c. is nonsense;
while in the next line ‘sound _agen_’ either points to a
complete breakdown or indicates that, on the most recent
Cockney principles, ‘again’ could be pronounced ‘ag_ine_’
and rhymes _à la_ Mrs. Browning. The text is _1677_.]
[Line: 28 set] shadow _1677_.]
[Line: 35 define] describe _1677_.]
[Line: 37 perfections _1651_, _1653_: perfection _1677_.]
[Line: 43 brief = ‘list’.]
[Line: 44 name-sak’d _1651_, _1653_.]
[Line: 45 the] your _1677_.]
[Line: 52 _1677_, not nearly so well, ‘see and’ for ‘feel,
to’. You want the list of senses completed and summed up by
such a palate in ‘see’, which, repeated, spoils all.]
[Line: 54 _1651_, _1653_ have ‘his’ for ‘hers’; but ‘a double
prize’ is more vivid if less strictly defensible than ‘the
beauteous’ of _1677_. So in 56 _1677_ opens with ‘Seeing each’
instead of ‘When from’–much feebler. But in 57-8 The text,
which is _1677_, is better than _1653_:
Or can the sight be deaf _if she but speak_,
A well-tuned face, such moving rhetoric?
which indeed is, if not nonsense, most clumsily expressed,
even if comma at ‘face’ be deleted.]
[Line: 60 and melts] yet melts _1677_.]
[Line: 66 ‘sixt’ _1651_, _1653_, _1677_.]
[Lines: 70-1 The punctuation of the old texts–no comma at
‘flowers’ and one at ‘hearse’–makes the passage hard to
understand. As I have altered this punctuation, it is clear.]
[Line: 73 what Divines] _1651_, _1653_, &c. ‘with Divines’.]
[Line: 75 come now _1677_: come, come _1651_, _1653_.]
[Line: 83 square] squared _1677_. If all this is not burlesque
it is very odd.]
[Line: 85 you undertake not _1651_, _1653_.]
[Line: 91 roll] rouse _1651_, _1653_. ravelled] revealed
_1651_, _1653_.]
[Line: 98 the] her _1651_, _1653_.]
[Line: 100 The hundred lines making the _heca_tomb–and the
metaphysical matter the subject of sacrifice.]
Some external links (of my choice):
Join Poetry Monster and post your own poems and articles.
Poems in Russian (you’d have to switch the language, otherwise you won’t see much of anything if anything)
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (yes there are a few others)
Qwant.com – the best search engine for searches in Romance and Germanic languages, excellent for English as well.
Ecosia – a German search engine
Duckduckgo.com — they are actually very good
Russian Commerce Agency – an export-import and contact facilitation agency
Talking Writing Monster – ideas and commentary
- Hecatomb is a painting by Roger Clarke, fair use[↩]