Sound & Sense: Simples to Sell

After sixth months of our Poems Ancient and Modern project, we offer an open thread for your suggestions, notes on what you’re reading and doing, etc.

Charles Meynier, Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry, 1800 (Cleveland Museum of Art)

Simples to Sell

by Gervase Markham and William Sampson

Come buy, you lusty gallants,
   These simples which I sell;
In all your days were never seen like these,
   For beauty, strength, and smell.
Here’s the king-cup, the pansy with the violet,
   The rose that loves the shower,
   The wholesome gillyflower,
      Both the cowslip, lily,
      And the daffodilly,
   With a thousand in my power.

Here’s gold amaranthus,
   That true love can provoke,
Of horehound store, and poisoning hellebore,
   With the polipode of the oak;
Here’s chaste vervine, and lustful eringo,
   Health preserving sage,
   And rue which cures old age,
      With a world of others,
      Making fruitful mothers;
   All these attend me as my page.

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Today’s Poem is part of a song — reportedly extracted from a nearly forgotten 1622 play, Herod and Antipater, by Gervase Markham (1568–1637) and William Sampson (1590?–1636?).

I say “reportedly” in what may be an excess of caution. Lacking library access at the moment to check the original, I’m relying for the text on old, noncritical anthologies. But the song is offered here anyway, in part because it’s fun: a small but fine example of list-making in poetry — an aspect of versifying that has fascinated poets since at least the Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad.

In larger part, however, the song is offered here because it reflects some of the retrospection we’ve recently undertaken as we reach the half-year milestone for Poems Ancient and Modern. As the song lists the herbs and essences the simples-seller sells, Sally Thomas and I — simples-sellers, both — have begun to think of the poems we’ve published in the six months since we began this project.

As a reminder, this is the manifesto with which we opened:

And through it all, we declare — we shout, we exhort, we demand: Art for Art’s Sake. We will publish or refuse nothing merely because of some extraneous feature of the author. Fascinated by biography, we will often comment on the life and times of the writers whose works we choose, as well as the literary movements and genres to which they belonged, but we will do no bean-counting. No special pleading. No elevations or diminishments based on the poets’ socio-political opinions. Good poems, or even just interesting poems, are not dependent for their goodness, or even just their interestingness, on anything other than their poetic content. 

Art must be revived in our time, and so we have begun this new poetry publication to examine the great tradition of English verse in the terms of English verse. And we will present these poems to the reading public as still alive, still powerful, and still worth holding on to — permanent gifts to our shared sense of language, the inner life of the psyche, the natural world, and the numinous that lies beyond.

We’ll be making some changes in the coming weeks, incorporating new features for subscribers — closing in now on 2,500 followers receiving this daily poetry offering.

Let us know your thoughts and suggestions for continuing the growth of Poems Ancient and Modern — and, as always in these occasional open-mic threads, let your fellow readers know what you’re reading, writing, and thinking about.

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