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Home  »  The Book of Restoration Verse  »  John Cleveland (1613–1658)

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Restoration Verse. 1910.

Fuscara, or the Bee Errant

John Cleveland (1613–1658)

NATURE’S confectioner, the bee,

(Whose suckets are moist alchemy,

The still of his refining mold

Minting the garden into gold,)

Having rifled all the fields

Of what dainty Flora yields,

Ambitious now to take exercise

Of a more fragrant paradise,

At my Fuscara’s sleeve arrived

Where all delicious sweets are hived.

The airy freebooter distrains

First on the violet of her veins,

Whose tincture, could it be more pure,

His ravenous kiss has made it bluer.

Here did he sit and essence quaff

Till her coy pulse had beat him off;

That pulse which he that feels may know

Whether the world’s long lived or no.

The next he preys on is her palm,

That almoner of transpiring balm;

So soft, ’tis air but once removed;

Tender as ’twere a jelly gloved.

Here, while his canting drone-pipe scanned

The mystic figures of her hand,

He tipples palmistry and dines

On all her fortune-telling lines.

He bathes in bliss and finds no odds

Betwixt her nectar and the gods.

He perches now upon her wrist,

A proper hawk for such a fist,

Making that flesh his bill of fare

Which hungry cannibals would spare;

Where lilies in a lovely brown

Inoculate carnation.

Her argent skin with or so streamed

As if the milky way were creamed.

From hence he to the woodbine bends

That quivers at her finger’s ends,

That runs division on the tree

Like a thick-branching pedigree.

So ’tis not her the bee devours,

It is a pretty maze of flowers;

It is the rose that bleeds, when he

Nibbles his nice phlebotomy.

About her finger he doth cling

In the fashion of a wedding-ring,

And bids his comrades of the swarm

Crawl like a bracelet ’bout her arm.

Thus when the hovering publican

Had sucked the toll of all her span,

Tuning his draughts with drowsy hums

As Danes carouse by kettle-drums,

It was decreed, that poesie gleaned,

The small familiar should be weaned.

At this the errant’s courage quails;

Yet aided by his native sails

The bold Columbus still designs

To find her undiscovered mines.

To the Indies of her arm he flies,

Fraught with east and western prize;

Which when he had in vain essayed,

Armed like a dapper lancepesade

With Spanish pike, he broached a pore

And so both made and healed the sore:

For as in gummy trees is found

A salve to issue at the wound,

Of this, her breach, the like was true;

Hence trickled out a balsam, too.

But oh, what wasp was it that could prove

Ravaillac to my Queen of Love!

The king of bees, now jealous grown

Lest her beams should melt his throne,

And finding that his tribute slacks,

(His burgesses and state of wax

Turned to a hospital, the combs

Built rank and file like beadsmen’s rooms.

And what they bleed but tart and sour

Matched with my Danae’s golden shower,

Live honey all, the envious elf

Stung her ’cause sweeter than himself.

Sweetness and she are so allied

The bee committed parricide.