Books

The 18th Century, putting the pornography into poetry

Jon Davis | Monday 14 February, 2011 12:38

I wonder if T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste land’ would prove more popular with a little more smut in it. How about some Seamus Heaney with a cleverly placed dildo? Well, an Oxford academic has recently found pornographic poems hidden at the end of a popular 18th Century poetry volume.

The ‘Cabinet of Love’, a section containing three poems, was found within ‘The Works of the Earl and Roscommon’ and waxes lyrical about the dildo. These findings give a hint as to why the volume proved so popular, with over twenty editions reprinted.

‘The Discovery’ is a love poem, of sorts, about a gentleman who spies on a woman within her bedroom. Thinking she’s alone she soon produces ‘a Tool,/ Much like that with which men women rule.’ It doesn’t take an Oxford academic to guess what that might be. Another, the ‘A Panegrick Upon Cundum’, could be an early advert for safe sex. A section reads ‘Happy the Man, who in his Pockets keeps… A well made Cundum – He, nor dreads the Ills Of Shankers or Cordee, Or Bubus dire!’

Of course, we shouldn’t be too surprised by this. Racy 18th Century poetry is nothing new; in fact our poetic predecessors were much more likely to insert a dildo into their verse than our modern wordsmiths. Lord Rochester, played by Johnny
Depp in the film ‘The Libertine’, churned out well-known, critically praised, and debauched verse nearly a century earlier. Unfortunately he didn’t follow the advice of using a ‘cundum’, and died of syphilis. The question of what counts as literature and what is merely titillating low culture has always been divided by a blurred barrier, and the discovery of these poems simply adds to a large and established cannon.

For those who’ve don’t read the cheeky Lord Rochester, here’s a taste.

A Ramble in St. James’s Park (extract)

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see

Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Weent out into St. James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th’ honor on ‘t,
‘Tis consecrate to prick and cunt.

There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict behan to whore,
Deluded of his assignation

(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother’s face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.

Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove

Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,

Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.

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