Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

To the State of Love; Or the Senses’ Festival

John Cleveland (1613–1658)

I SAW a vision yesternight

Enough to sate a Seeker’s sight;

I wished myself a Shaker there,

And her quick pants my trembling sphere.

It was a she so glittering bright,

You’d think her soul an Adamite;

A person of so rare a frame,

Her body might be lined with the same.

Beauty’s chiefest maid of honour,

You may break Lent with looking on her.

Not the fair Abbess of the skies

With all her nunnery of eyes

Can show me such a glorious prize!

And yet because ’tis more renown

To make a shadow shine, she’s brown,—

A brown for which Heaven would disband

The galaxy and stars be tanned;

Brown by reflection as her eye

Dazzle’s the summer’s livery.

Old dormant windows must confess

Her beams their glimmering spectacles;

Struck with the splendour of her face

Do the office of a burning glass.

Now where such radiant lights have shown

No wonder if her cheeks be grown

Sunburned, with lustre of her own.

My sight took pay but (thank my charms!)

I now impale her in mine arms,—

(Love’s compasses confining you,

Good angels, to a circle too.)

Is not the universe straight-laced

When I can clasp it in the waist?

My amorous folds about thee hurled

With Drake I girdle in the world;

I hoop the firmament, and make

This, my embrace, the zodiac.

How could thy center take my sense

When admiration doth commence

At the extreme circumference?

Now to the melting kiss that sips

The jellied philtre of her lips;

So sweet there is no tongue can praise’t

Till transubstantiate with a taste.

Inspired like Mahomet from above

By the billing of my heavenly dove

Love prints his signets in her smacks,

Those ruddy drops of squeezing wax,

Which, wheresoever she imparts,

They’ve privy seals to take up hearts.

Our mouths encountering at the sport

My slippery soul had quit the fort

But that she stopped the sally-port.

Next to these sweets, her lips dispence

(As twin conserves of eloquence,)

The sweet perfume of her breath affords,

Incorporating with her words.

No rosary this votress needs,—

Her very syllables are beads;

No sooner ’twixt those rubies born,

But jewels are in ear-rings worn.

With that delight her speech doth enter;

It is a kiss of the second venter.

And I dissolve at what I hear

As if another Rosamond were

Couched in the labyrinth of my ear.

Yet that’s but a preludious bliss,

Two souls pickeering in a kiss.

Embraces do but draw the line,

’Tis storming that must take her in.

When bodies join and victory hovers

’Twixt the equal fluttering lovers,

This is the game; make stakes, my dear!

Hark, how the sprightly chanticleer,

(That Baron Tell-clock of the night,)

Sounds boutesel to Cupid’s knight.

Then have at all, the pass is got,

For coming off, oh, name it not!

Who would not die upon the spot?