Today’s Poem: Ode To Tobacco

Smith, take a fresh cigar! / Jones, the tobacco jar!

Adriaen Brouwer, The Smokers, c. 1636 (Wikimedia Commons)

Ode To Tobacco

by Charles Stuart Calverley

Thou, who when fears attack
Bidst them avaunt, and Black
Care, at the horseman’s back
Perching, unseatest;
Sweet when the morn is gray;
Sweet when they’ve cleared away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest!

I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told
Not to thy credit:
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost, —
Useless, except to roast —
Doctors have said it;

How they who use fusees        ◦ fusees = match flares; here, metaphorically, cigars
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards,
Go mad, and beat their wives,
Plunge (after shocking lives)
Razors and carving-knives
Into their gizzards.

Confound such knavish tricks!
Yet know I five or six
Smokers who freely mix
Still with their neighbors, —
Jones, who, I’m glad to say,
Asked leave of Mrs. J.,
Daily absorbs a clay                    ◦ clay = tobacco in a clay smo…