Senses Festival, to the State of Love by 1 John Clev

Senses Festival

To the State of Love. Or the Senses’ Festival.

I saw a vision yesternight,
Enough to sate a Seeker’s sight;
I wished myself a Shaker there,
And her quick pants my trembling sphere.
It was a she so glittering bright,
You’d think her soul an Adamite;
A person of so rare a frame,
Her body might be lined with’ same.
Beauty’s chiefest maid of honour,
You may break Lent with looking on her.
Not the fair Abbess of the skies,
With all her nunnery of eyes,
Can show me such a glorious prize!

And yet, because ’tis more renown
To make a shadow shine, she’s brown;
A brown for which Heaven would disband
The galaxy, and stars be tanned;
Brown by reflection as her eye
Deals out the summer’s livery.
Old dormant windows must confess
Her beams; their glimmering spectacles,
Struck with the splendour of her face,
Do th’ office of a burning-glass.
Now where such radiant lights have shown,
No wonder if her cheeks be grown
Sunburned, with lustre of her own.

My sight took pay, but (thank my charms!)
I now impale her in mine arms;
(Love’s compasses confining you,
Good angels, to a circle too.)
Is not the universe strait-laced
When I can clasp it in the waist?
My amorous folds about thee hurled,
With Drake I girdle in the world;
I hoop the firmament, and make
This, my embrace, the zodiac.
How would thy centre take my sense
When admiration doth commence
At the extreme circumference?

Now to the melting kiss that sips
The jellied philtre of her lips;
So sweet there is no tongue can praise ‘t
Till transubstantiate with a taste.
Inspired like Mahomet from above
By th’ billing of my heavenly dove,
Love prints his signets in her smacks,
Those ruddy drops of squeezing wax,
Which, wheresoever she imparts,
They’re privy seals to take up hearts.
Our mouths encountering at the sport,
My slippery soul had quit the fort,
But that she stopped the sally-port.

Next to these sweets, her lips dispense
(As twin conserves of eloquence)
The sweet perfume her breath affords,
Incorporating with her words.
No rosary this vot’ress needs–
Her very syllables are beads;
No sooner ‘twixt those rubies born,
But jewels are in ear-rings worn.
With what delight her speech doth enter;
It is a kiss o’ th’ second venter.
And I dissolve at what I hear,
As if another Rosamond were
Couched in the labyrinth of my ear.

Yet that ‘s but a preludious bliss,
Two souls pickeering in a kiss.
Embraces do but draw the line,
‘Tis storming that must take her in.
When bodies join and victory hovers
‘Twixt the equal fluttering lovers,
This is the game; make stakes, my dear!
Hark, how the sprightly chanticleer
(That Baron Tell-clock of the night)
Sounds boutesel to Cupid’s knight.
Then have at all, the pass is got,
For coming off, oh, name it not!
Who would not die upon the spot?

Some useful annotations from the 1921 anthology (Cleveland can be cryptic):

[_To the State of Love, &c._ appeared first _1651_.
The stanzas are not divided in the early editions, but are so
in _1677_. Carew’s _Rapture_ may have given some suggestions,
Apuleius and Lucretius also; but not much is required. The
substance is shocking to pure prudery, no doubt; but, as
observed in the introduction, there is perhaps more gusto in
the execution than in _Fuscara_.

A copy of this poem, with many minor variants, is in Bodleian
MS. Tanner 306, fol. 424: it has one noteworthy reading, ‘took
sey’, i.e. ‘say’ or ‘assay’–the hunting term–in l. 27.]

[Lines: 2, 3 The use of capitals in the seventeenth century is
so erratic that it is dangerous to base much on it. But both
‘Seekers’ and ‘Shakers’ (a variant of ‘Quakers’) were actually
among the countless sects of the time, as well of course as
‘Adamites’. _1651_. _1653_, _1654_, and _1657_ have ‘tempt’
for _1677_ ‘sate’.]

[Line: 4 pants _1677_: ‘pulse’ _1651_, _1653_, _1654_,
_1657_.]

[Line: 10 ‘You’d break a Lent’ _1651_, _1653_.]

[Lines: 11-13 Benlowes’s lines (_v. sup._ i. 356)–

The lady prioress of the cloistered sky, &c.–

are more poetic than these, but may be less original. Even
that, however, is uncertain. Both poets, though Benlowes was
a good deal the elder, were of St. John’s, and must, even in
other ways, have known each other: _Theophila_ appeared a year
after the edition in which this poem was first included. But
the indebtedness may be the other way, or common to an earlier
original, or non-existent.]

[Line: 19 Deals out] The earlier texts have ‘Dazzle’s’, but
_1677_ seems here to have introduced the true reading found
also in the _MS._ ‘Deals out’ is far more poetical: the eye
clothes with its own reflection sky and stars, and earth.]

[Lines: 20-3 The punctuation of all editions, including Mr.
Berdan’s, makes these lines either totally unintelligible, or
very confused, by putting a stop at ‘spectacles’ and none at
‘beams’. That adopted in the text makes it quite clear.]

[Line: 30 circle] ‘compass’ _1651_, _1653_, evidently wrong.]

[Line: 33 It is not impossible that Aphra Behn had these
lines unconsciously in her head when she wrote her own finest
passage. Unconsciously, for the drift is quite different; but
‘hurled’, ‘amorous’, and ‘world’ come close together in both.]

[Line: 34 _1651_, _1653_ again ‘compass’ for ‘girdle’.]

[Line: 37 ‘would’, the reading of _1651_, _1653_, infinitely
better than ‘could’, that of _1677_.]

[Line: 45 In this pyramidally metaphysical passage Cleveland
does not quite play the game. Mahomet’s pigeon did not _kiss_
him. But ‘privy seals to take up hearts’ is very dear to
fancy, most delicate, and of liberal conceit. So also ‘jewels
are in ear-rings worn’ below; where the game is played to its
rigour, though the reader may not at first see it.]

[Line: 46 his] ‘her’ _1651_, _1653_; but it clearly should be
‘his’, which is in _1677_.]

[Line: 53 _1651_, _1653_ read ‘Next to those sweets her lips
dispense’, _nescio an melius_.]

[Line: 61 her] ‘our,’ a variant of one edition (_1665_) is all
wrong.]

[Line: 62 Mr. Berdan has strangely misinterpreted ‘venter’.
The phrase is quite a common one–‘of the second _marriage_.’
The first kiss comes of lip and lip, the second of lip and
love.]

[Line: 67 pickeering] ‘marauding’, ‘skirmishing in front of an
army’.]

[Line: 70 For ‘join’ [jine] _1651_, _1653_ and others have
‘whine’–suggesting the Latin _gannitus_ frequent in such
contexts. But ‘join’ must be right. Professor Gordon points
out that the passage is a reminiscence of Donne, in his
_Extasie_:

As ‘twixt two equall Armies, Fate
Suspends uncertaine victorie,
Our soules (which to advance their state
Were gone out,) hung ‘twixt her, and mee.(13-16.)

This is contrasted with the bodily ‘entergrafting’ of l. 9,
&c.]

[Line: 74 When ‘prose and sense’ came in they were very
contemptuous of this Baron Tell-clock. But the image is
complete, congruous, and capable of being championed.]

[Line: 75 ‘Boutesel’ of course = ‘boot and saddle’, albeit
’boute’ does not mean ‘boot’.]