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Examples of 18th century love poetry

“[A]nd the cleverness of this trifle [ie the Kitty riddle] is shown in its throwing guessers off the scent by sending them to explore the region of fades, common-places about love, and flames and cupids.”
      — 
Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, biographer of David Garrick

​See also: Authorship and Variations of Kitty, a Fair But Frozen Maid
.
The complete Kitty poem is posted there as well.



Picture
Cupid starting a fire, British Museum
      My article about the meaning and significance of the riddle Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid in the novel Emma appears in the December 2022 online version of the Jane Austen Society of North America journal Persuasions. While millions of readers have enjoyed the Austen's novel Emma, they may not be aware that modern scholars regard this riddle, partly quoted in the novel, as being worse than bawdy--experts tell us that it is obscene, coarse and horrific, because it speaks of "willing victims" who bleed. This riddle has been interpreted as being about the "flames" of venereal disease and it allegedly mentions to cures which were used at the time. Jane Austen dropping a reference to venereal disease into Emma? Mr. Woodhouse trying to recall an obscene riddle to recite to Harriet and Emma? Yes, that is what the modern academics believe.
      My article rebuts this interpretation, but I won't repeat my argument here. Instead, I'm posting examples of 18th century love poetry to provide additional evidence that the idioms and imagery of Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid, far from being disturbing or perverse, were indeed commonplace in love poetry, both serious and comical. Further, many of these idioms are still used today in song lyrics.

Flames and Fires of Love

    First and most obviously, "flames" and "fire" are commonly used to refer to love and lust, not just to venereal disease. That was true then and it's true today. In a 1799 tribute to a serving woman, the “flames that you impart” are not the fires of syphilis but the pangs of love, or at least lust. Like the Kitty riddle, To Sally at the _____ Chop house, excerpted below, involves double allusions, in this case to passion and grilling meat. Sally’s flames “broil” the poet’s “tender heart,” not his genitals, though I leave it to the reader to interpret the meaning of the request for a “helping hand.”

This comical poem appeared in 
The Ladies’ Monthly Museum and Polite Repository.[i]  In all examples, the emphasis is added:
Oh, Sally! could I turn and shift my Love
With the same skill that you your Steak can move,
My Heart, thus cook’d, might prove a Chop-house feast,
And you alone should be the welcome guest.
But, dearest Sal, the flames that you impart,
Like Chop on Grid-iron, broil my tender heart,
Which, if thy kindly helping hand ben’t nigh,
Must, like an unturn’d Chop, hiss, burn, and fry…
Austen’s favorite moral writer, Dr. Johnson, included a comical love letter in a letter-writing manual that he edited. Here the writer jokes about the intensity of his flame of love:[ii]
Cupid draw back your bow
And let your arrow go
Straight to my lover's heart for me, for me

​Fun fact:
The word "syphilis" has Latin roots. It came from a poem written in Latin:  "Syphilis, sive Morbvs Gallicvs, by Girolamo Fracastoro or Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483–1553).
​Madam… that son of a Whore Cupid has pink’d me all over with his confounded Arrows, that, by my troth, I look like… your Ladyship’s Pincushion… For, Madam, while I was Star-gazing t’other Night at your Window, full of Fire and Flame (as we Lovers use to be) I dropt plumb into your fish-pond, by the same Token, that I hissed like a red-hot Horse-shoe flung into a Smith’s trough. ‘Twas a hundred pound to a Penny, but I had been drowned, for those that came to my Assistance, left me to shift for myself, while they scrambled for boiled Fish that were as plenty as Herrings at Rotterdam.
Love’s fire could be purifying, like a refiner’s fire. In the 1807 poem Felix and Eugenius,[iii] Eugenius is surprised to see his old friend Felix, who he thought drank himself to death. Felix explains that he was saved by the love of a good woman: Eugenius is skeptical that love could have wrought such a miracle. Felix insists:

           You never felt of love those sacred fires
           That wake chaste hopes and delicate desires…

 
Eugenius exclaims that Cupid is usually thought of as a prankster, but here, he is a doctor who has saved Felix from his “disease,” which is not venereal disease, but his vice of alcoholism.
Cupid, methought, in pranks like these display’d
His busy, meddling, mischief-making trade…
A prodigy of kindness shows to thee
In him a friend indeed in need we see;
Quack-like (at least in all but handling fees)
He cures thee of incurable disease… 
​
Stupid Cupid you're a real mean guy
I'd like to clip your wings so you can't fly
I'm in love and it's a crying shame
And I know that you're the one to blame
Hey hey, set me free
Stupid Cupid stop picking on me

Cruel Cupid

In a 1783 poem published in The Lady’s Magazine,[iv] or Entertaining companion for the fair sex, Cupid’s darts are “peace-destroying,” he is “cruel” and the “bane of joy.” The poet pleads, “Thy dart withdraw from out my breast:”
Thou feed’st with hope my fond desire
Retrimm’d my flame with ardent fire…

 
In this song a man asks Cupid to “shoot and grieve” the object of his love:[v]
 
Sir Cupid, why am I so wounded:
What have I done, dull God, to thee,
That thou hast me so quite confounded,
And takes Delight to torture me?
 
You make me love a charming Creature
That will not look so low at all
As me; and yet her comely Feature
Holds me a Captive still in Thrall…
 
O cruel Cupid, shoot and grieve her,
And make her yield to my Desire;
Or cure me of this Love-sick Fever,
That scorches me like burning Fire…

In Annelide and Arcite (1795), a girl laments her unrequited love:[vi]
One word to soothe my heart o’erwhelm’d with woe;
For at another’s shrine the victim bleeds,
And the new vow the broken vow succeeds,
Yet while he scorns, and ridicules my pain,
Ah! still I love him, spight of my disdain!
Still the fond poisons rankle in my heart,
Flame thro; my veins, and torture every part!
Victim of love
​
I see a broken heart
You got your stories to tell
Victim of love
It's such an easy part
And you know how to play it so well
I'm carrying a torch for you
I'm carrying a torch
You know how much it costs
To keep carrying a torch

Flame of love it burns so bright
That is my desire
Keep on liftin' me, liftin' me up
Higher and higher

 A “young lady” offered a long poem to the Edinburgh Magazine crammed with classical allusions, in which she asks:
Cupid, hear; then take my heart;
Wound me; but with gentlest dart.
Be not thy bow with sorrow strung.
Such griefs as dying Sappho sung…
(many lines of classical allusions, yada yada yada)
 …Muse! There my steps no longer lead,
Lest I among these victims bleed,
But boy delicious, grant to me
A spark of that light gaiety…. Etc.[vii]
"Love Arrow" refers to something rather more naughty here.

Victims and Bleeding

Alice Chandler asserted the line: “some willing victim bleeds” is “literally hymeneal” (39). “Hymeneal” is a reference to Hymen, the god of marriage. Some 18th century poets, notably Pope, referred to married people as the victims of Hymen, the god of marriage, as in Pope’s 1711 epistle to a female friend: But, Madam, if the Fates withstand, and you / Are destin’d Hymen’s willing victim…[ix]
An 1800 poem by a “Mrs. Hale” has Chloe regretting her marriage:[x]

O no, never fear, he’s so formal, so cold,
I never, no never, can love him again;
Why then, cruel Hymen, two victims withhold,
When both would rejoice to get rid of thy chain?
 
Her friend Hebe answers:
Yet tell me, my Chloe, pray can it be so--
Did Cupid himself your two hearts then unite?
By Love himself kindled, no torrent could flow
I thought could extinguish a flame once so bright.
 

Chloe refers to Cupid as “the boy,” just as in the Kitty riddle:

My dear girl, let experience persuade
Believe not what men when they’re lovers will say;
For no sooner the boy saw the fools he had made,
Than he blew out his torch, and strait flew far away.

 
But I have found no reference to hymeneal bleeding in poetry. “Bleeding” is used in conjunction with hearts, not hymen, in many poems, and the imagery was inherited from classical poetry:

From Acontius to Cydippe, a 1808 translation of Ovid, we find more “bleeding victims” of love:

…As Cupid’s arrows have been felt by me,
Beware lest Phoebe’s should be aim’d at thee…
But when—-so heav’n permit—the signals sound,
And bleeding victims stain the sacred ground:
A golden image of the fruit be seen,
With these two verses to the quiver’d Queen…
[xi]
You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love
Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
You cut me open
Oh yeah
Tainted Love -- once I ran to you,
​now I run from you

Cupid clichés

 In The Ladies Polite Songster, 1780, a girl complains about the overwrought clichés her suitor uses:

Young Colin seeks my heart to move,
And sighs and talks so much of love,
He’ll hang or drown I fear for it;
Of pangs and wounds and pointed darts,
Of Cupid’s bow and bleeding hearts,
I vow I cannot bear it.

 
Another poet decides to give up the clichés in his 1762 poem A Familiar Letter of Rhymes to a Lady: [xii]

…Therefore, omitting flames and darts,
Wounds, sighs and tears, and bleeding hearts,
Obeying, what I here declare,
Makes half my happiness, the fair….
The favourite subject I pursue,
And write, as who would not, for you….
Late at night
You're takin' me home
You say you want to stay
I say I want to be alone
I say I don't love you
But you know I'm a liar
'Cause when we kiss, ooh
Fire
Joseph Addison printed a parody of a love-letter in issue #71 of The Spectator in 1797, supposedly written by an uneducated footman. This garbling of clichés was seen as comic:

My Dear Betty,
Remember your bleeding lover, who lies bleeding at the wounds Cupid made with the arrows he borrowed at the eyes of Venus, which is your sweet person…


​“Poor James!” said the editor, who offers to re-write the letter: “the style of which seems to be confused with scraps he had got in hearing and reading what he did not understand.”[xiii]
Well, Romeo and Juliet
Samson and Delilah
Baby you can bet
A love they couldn't deny
My words say split
But my words they lie
'Cause when we kiss, ooh
Fire

Picture
...Twas Love! the little wandering sprite, 
 His pinion sparkled through the night!
I knew him by his bow and dart;
I knew him by my fluttering heart!
I take him in, and fondly raise
The dying embers' cheering blaze...
Cupid and Fireplaces
     There's another Cupid/fireplace connection which I gather would have been known to the well-educated Georgian Englishman. An ode by the Greek poet Anacreon tells of a man who finds Cupid shivering with cold on his doorstep. He invites him in to warm himself by the fire. But once the urchin recovers, he fires a dart at the poet's heart, and flies away. 
    The blog "Gods and Foolish Grandeur" displays a series of paintings illustrating the poem, with an 1800 English translation of the Ode.  The print at right shows shows a contemporary interpretation of the tale.


 Click here for an earlier 1713 translation of the third ode of Anacreon.
  
Picture
     These examples, and the long-standing association of Cupid with fires and fireplaces, all serve to remind us that we should not look at the Kitty riddle in isolation. I think the evidence points to the conclusion that the Kitty riddle draws on classical poetry, not obscene Georgian slang, for its allusions.

[i], “To Sally at the _____Chophouse,” The Lady's Monthly Museum, (95).

[ii] Johnson, Samuel. A compleat introduction to the Art of Writing Letters, (163).

[iii] Jones, Jenkin. “Eugenius and Felix,” Pros and cons, for Cupid and Hymen (128—138).

[iv] “Cupid Triumphant, or Damon in Chains,” in The Lady's Magazine. (48).

[v]   Nicol, Alexander. Nature without Art: (66).

[vi] “Annelide and Arcite,” in Charlotte, an Elegy, etc. (15).

[vii]  Anonymous, “Written by a young lady,” Edinburgh Magazine, 119.

[ix] “Epistle to Miss Blount,” in The Works of Alexander Pope. (398).

[x] “Dialogue,” in Poetical attempts. By Mrs. Hale, 1800, (102).

[xi] James, Charles. “Acontius to Cydippe.” Poems. T. Egerton, 1808., (89).

[xii]  Lloyd, Robert. “A Familiar Letter of Rhimes to a Lady,” The St. James's Magazine for December 1762. (228).

[xiii] Steele, Richard., Addison, Joseph. “To Elizabeth,” in The Spectator #71, May 22, 1778. (87).
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