The Food of the Poets

IN these days, when we study diet so carefully and suspect food of determining character, there is wisdom in considering the menus of the older poets, that we may gather a hint or two about dynamic nourishment for a new race of poets. Pleasantly we turn back to the Golden Age, when shepherds contended in song beside a streamlet where

When Thyrsis sang to the goatherd in the first idyll of Theocritus, the entranced listener breathed this prayer: —

Filled may thy fair mouth be with honey, Thyrsis, and filled with honeycomb; and the sweet dried fig mayst thou eat of Ægilus, for thou vanquishest the cicada in song! Lo, here is thy cup; see, my friend, of how pleasant a savour! Thou wilt think it has been dipped in the wellspring of the hours.

Pastoral tradition has lingered late; we have many echoes in Elizabethan England of the poet’s enjoyment of cheese and milk, honey, wild olives, pears, plums, apples, roasted chestnuts, and country wine. From such feasting does the purest lyric poetry flow.

As for Shakespeare, he ate venison pasties and drank — happy augury — canary wine. Was it remembrance that dictated Titania’s command that, to make Bottom like an airy spirit go, the fairies should

Herrick, most gentle and deft of lyric artists, was quite explicit about his daily life: —

The Cavalier Poets ate little, to judge from the testimony about them; their ways were certainly open to Amendment. After them came the age of those who did

The critics have praised the liquid note of Burns, but they have commented too exclusively upon a single source. Let us remember that the best of the lyrics were written in the days when Burns was forced by poverty to partake most frequently of

In the nineteenth century, the most memorable suggestion is from Coleridge: —

But to acquire this celestial drink, one would have to traverse the Milky Way every morning, and probably pay a luxury tax upon return.

What did Coleridge himself enjoy as food? Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal gives us occasional items about the ‘plain living’ he shared with them. When Dorothy and William were together at Keswick, in 1794, Dorothy said: ‘We find our own food: our breakfast and supper are of milk, but our dinner chiefly of potatoes, and we drink no tea.’ At Grasmere, at the height of Wordsworth’s poetic inspiration, they had peas, kidney beans, ‘spinnach,’ eggs, and cream.

Shelley was, on principle, a vegetarian; Byron, so gossip said, had a diet of rice and vinegar. In the year 1813 he took six biscuit a day and tea.

For Robert Browning one thinks inevitably of pomegranates, but must be content with less exotic food. He, an admirer of Shelley, was for a time a vegetarian, and wrote to Elizabeth Barrett, in 1845, of having lived ‘a couple of years and more on bread and potatoes.’ Of the married life of the Brownings we have charming glimpses in Mrs. Browning’s Letters: ‘Miss Boyle comes at night at nine o’clock to catch us at our hot chestnuts and mulled wine, and warm her feet at our fire.’ (It is assumed that the feet were poetic.)

The poem by Mr. Yeats which has moved a host, of readers to idyllic dreams is authority on our subject: —

Since writing the above, we have had a lyric poet as guest at luncheon. When we sat down at the table, I was pleased to observe that, our hostess, herself a poet, had included among the offerings to the singer a glass of creamy milk and a jar of liquid golden honey. This is conclusive.