An Hellespont of Cream
by John Davies
The author loving these homely meats specially, Viz: cream, pancakes, buttered pippin-pies (laugh, good people) and tobacco; writ to That worthy and virtuous gentlewoman, Whom he call mistress, as followeth: — If there were, oh! an Hellespont of cream Between us, milk-white Mistress, I would swim To you, to show to both my love’s extreme, Leander-like, — yea! dive from brim to brim. But met I with a butter’d pippin-pie Floating upon’t, that would I make my boat, To waft me to you without jeopardy: Though sea-sick I might be while it did float. Yet if a storm should rise, by night or day, Of sugar snows and hail of care-aways, ◦ care-aways = caraway seeds Then, if I found a pancake in my way, It like a plank should bring me to your kays, ◦ kays = quays Which having found, if they tobacco kept, The smoke should dry me well before I slept.
You gotta love a poem that goes deep enough into the fantastical and the hallucinogenic that it imagines a strait of cream between Asia and Europe, which the lover will cross in an apple-pie boat — a buttered apple-pie boat — even though storms of sugar and caraway seeds beset him. The author undoubtedly composed the poem as a parody of his era’s extravagant love poetry, but, yowza, does he set his imagination of the ridiculous free — free enough that he promises to walk a pancake plank to his mistress’s wharf, where pipe smoke will dry him off.
The poet is John Davies (c. 1565–1618): “John Davies of Hereford,” as he dubbed himself, to avoid confusion with a contemporary poet also named John Davies. A prolific scribbler, Davies of Hereford wrote a rambling treatise uniting the science of the time with a theological understanding of the human body in Microcosmos (1603) and other works. Wittes Pilgrimage (c. 1605) is a set of love sonnets. Humours Heav’n on Earth (1609) describes the plague. And the epigrams of Scourge of Folly (c. 1610) include descriptions of such contemporaries as Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Davies produced as well a popular writing manual, The Writing Schoole-Master, which went through several editions.
His “Hellespont of cream” (one of our lighter Wednesday verses here at Poems Ancient and Modern) comes from “To Worthy Persons,” the third section of his Scourge of Folly. It’s a Shakespearian sonnet: three pentameter quatrains with a concluding couplet, rhymed abab-cdcd-efef-gg. Often published with a title drawn from the opening words of the inscription, “The author loving these homely meats,” the poem lets the comic impulse run till it anticipates 19th-century nonsense verse and 1960s psychedelia.
I appreciate your unobtrusive marginal notes explaining the meaning of words whose orthography has changed.
Wish I could get me an author photo like that!