Today’s Poem: On Mites (To a Lady)

Have no fear; it’s only a metaphor

Georg Flegel, Still-life with Cheese and Cherries, 1635 (Wikimedia Commons)

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On Mites (To a Lady)

by Stephen Duck

’Tis but by way of Simile. 

Dear Madam, did you never gaze, 
Thro’ Optic-glass, on rotten Cheese? 
There, Madam, did you ne’er perceive 
A Crowd of dwarfish Creatures live? 
The little Things, elate with Pride, 
Strut to and fro, from Side to Side: 
In tiny Pomp, and pertly vain, 
Lords of their pleasing Orb, they reign; 
And, fill’d with harden’d Curds and Cream, 
Think the whole Dairy made for them. 
 
So Men, conceited Lords of all, 
Walk proudly o’er this pendent Ball, 
Fond of their little Spot below, 
Nor greater Beings care to know; 
But think, those Worlds, which deck the Skies, 
Were only form’d to please their Eyes. 
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Today’s Poem is an eighteenth-century curiosity by the now-obscure English poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756). Classified as a “natural” or untutored genius, Duck, son of a poor and obscure Wiltshire family, had left his charity school at thirteen to begin a life of field labor. A self-directed reader and self-taught poet, he came to the notice and patronage first of a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, then of Queen Caroline (1683–1737), wife of George II, who employed Duck as librarian for Merlin’s Cave, her folly at Richmond Park. Both Pope and Swift knew Stephen Duck, liked him personally for his sincere piety, and — when he was rumored to be in the running as the next poet laureate — savaged him in print for his rhymes.

To be honest, some of us might find ourselves tempted to join Pope and Swift in the satire corner. Against the backdrop of brittle laughter that characterized so much about the Augustan era, Duck’s “On Mites” reads a little like the effort of the earnest nerd to overexplain the homework, which he alone has understood, to the rest of the class. Or again, it sounds rather like an exercise undertaken by the same campus reporter, in James Thurber’s “University Days,” whose classic school-newspaper lede asks whether anybody has noticed the sores on the top of the horses in the animal husbandry building.

There is, for example, the epigraph’s assurance that despite the title, which some people might find off-putting, the poem isn’t actually about mites: “’Tis but by way of a simile.” Once we pass that sticking point and — understanding that we have embarked on a conceit — begin on the cheese course, the iambic tetrameter couplets rock along pleasingly, with some slant rhymes and cleverly emphatic metrical substitutions in lines 8, 10, and 13. But there’s something a little laborious in the setup of this epic simile (only symbolic mites in this poem, lady!). Has Madam failed to consider that the sense of entitlement that swells these (entirely metaphorical!) mites could suggest . . . something else?

At any rate, it’s possible to imagine how, in his day, Duck’s verse was parodied even as he himself was popular. It’s possible, too, to imagine the emotional toll exacted from an apparently decent man seeking to better himself among people whose personal admiration is never enough to silence their aesthetic criticisms.

Taking holy orders after the death of his royal patron, Duck accepted a series of clerical positions, burying the second of his wives and marrying a third. He continued to write poems. Everywhere he went, as always, he was popular. In 1756 he died by drowning, an apparent suicide, the man whose name had been whispered as a possible poet laureate, only because everybody liked him.

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