Herrick (Robert). The Hesperides & Noble Numbers [Works] . Edited by Alfred Pollard, with a preface by A.C. Swinburne. Engraved frontispiece. Lawrence & Bullen, The Muses’ Library, 1891. First Edition thus. One of 200 numbered Large Paper copies. Two volumes. Quarter parchment, spines lettered in gilt, . green cloth sides, top edge gilt, others uncut. Cloth just a little marked, otherwise a very nice set. £90
What sent me down this particular rabbit hole was a customer enquiry about this pretty copy of the poems of Robert Herrick (1591-1674) which we have in stock and of which I have long been fond. Was it, he asked, uncensored, with no words replaced by dashes and no poems omitted altogether? This is the case with some editions including, according to my correspondent, the Everyman edition which published a redacted version, incredibly, as recently as 1936. The Hesperides are nymphs of the evening, guardians of golden apples of the goddess Hera of Greek mythology.
I had not been aware of this at all. So which were the poems deemed too rude to publish? There are four obvious candidates, all reproduced below. ‘To the Virgins’ has essentially the same carpe diem message of Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, a poem I have both loved and found somewhat disturbing. The two Julia poems, of which there are very many more in this extraordinary collection of well over 1,000 poems, are certainly ‘saucy’, but I don’t find them smutty. They have been characterised in some feminist criticism as voyeuristic objectifications, but I think they can also be seen as rather beautiful, joyful and almost innocent albeit erotically charged celebrations of the female form and of the sensual. Also ‘circummortal’ is a wonderful word.
THE VINE
I dreamt this mortal part of mine
Was metamorphos’d to a vine;
Which crawling one and every way
Enthrall’d my dainty Lucia.
Methought, her long small legs and thighs
I with my tendrils did surprise;
Her belly, buttocks, and her waist
By my soft nerv’lets were embrac’d;
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters, hid among
The leaves, her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem’d to me
Young Bacchus ravish’d by his tree.
My curls about her neck did crawl,
And arms and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
All parts there made one prisoner.
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy’d,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancy I awoke;
And found, ah me! this flesh of mine
More like a stock than like a vine.
TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.
UPON JULIA’S BREASTS.
Display thy breasts, my Julia—there let me
Behold that circummortal purity,
Between whose glories there my lips I’ll lay,
Ravish’d in that fair via lactea.
UPON THE NIPPLES OF JULIA’S BREAST.
Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white?
Or else a cherry, double grac’d,
Within a lily centre plac’d?
Or ever mark’d the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drown’d in cream?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too?
So like to this, nay all the rest,Is each neat niplet of her breast.
TO HIS COY MISTRESS
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
I should say that I have no agenda other than to be tolerant of any consensual sexual activity between adults, indeed it really is none of my or anyone else’s business.
I find these Herrick poems far more appealing than the ‘ruder’ poems of D.H. Lawrence which seem in comparison reductive and somewhat tedious. ‘Figs’ is a good example.
FIGS
The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied,
heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.
But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.
Every fruit has its secret.
The fig is a very secretive fruit.
As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the
Romans, it is female.
The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.
Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;
And but one orifice.
The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.
There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;
Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.
It was always a secret.
That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.
There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a
bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Openly pledging heaven:
Here’s to the thorn in the flower! Here is to Utterance!_
The brave, adventurous rosaceae.
Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes _ricotta_,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman.
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen.
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilisation, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.
Till the drop of ripeness exudes,
And the year is over.
And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.
That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.
That’s how women die too.
The year is fallen over-ripe.
The year of our women.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.
The secret is laid bare.
And rottenness soon sets in.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.
When Eve once knew _in her mind_ that she was naked
She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.
She’d been naked all her days before,
But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.
She got the fact on her mind, and (quickly sewed fig-leaves.
And women have been sewing ever since.
But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.
They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,
And they won’t let us forget it.
Now, the secret
Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips
That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.
What then, good Lord_! cry the women.
We have kept our secret long enough.
We are a ripe fig.
Let us burst into affirmation_.
They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.
Ripe figs won’t keep.
Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.
Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.
What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation?
And bursten figs won’t keep?
This all got me thinking back to various examples of erotic literature and art we, as booksellers, have handled in the past. Lawrence’s painting ‘The Yawn’ was notable, and also the work of John Buckland Wright – there does not seem to have been a subject which that illustrator did not adorn with images of nymphs in various states of undress. We had the Fleece Press editions of his works in our centenary catalogue. see below. We have sold some but not all of them which may suggest a certain squeamishness. I am reliably informed that the artist’s son destroyed many of the images which depicted penetrative sex, which seems a great loss, but some slipped through the net. This website shows some of them and the erotic work of many other artists. If you are likely to be offended, as ever in my view of censorship, just don’t go there, don’t look.
honesterotica | illustration, intimacy, integrity and inspiration
Buckland Wright (John). Bathers and Dancers; the white line and silhouette engravings of John Buckland Wright. Introduction by Christopher Buckland Wright. Wood-engraved frontispiece, tipped-in photographic portrait of the artist and his wife, four tipped-in wood-engravings, wood-engraved plates. The Fleece Press, Wakefield, 1993. First Edition. One of 260 copies, this being one of 180 in quarter vellum and Japanese wood veneer boards, spine lettered in gilt, by Smith Settle. Set in Lutetia at the Whittington Press in red and black on Zerkall. Fine copy, as new, in supplied slipcase. Presentation Copy, inscribed by Simon Lawrence to Ian Rogerson on the half-title. Rogerson 32. £250
Buckland Wright (John). Baigneuses. Introduction by Christopher Buckland Wright. Twenty-five engravings printed from the wood blocks and eight tipped-in plates including a photographic portrait of the artist, some printed in blue. The Fleece Press, Denby Dale, 1995. First Edition. One of 234 copies, this being one of 204 in quarter vellum, Compton marbled paper boards, spine lettered in gilt, by Smith Settle, in Centaur and Arrighi on specially made Zerkall by Peter Sanderson at Whittington Court. Folio. Fine copy, as new, in cloth solander box, spine with printed label; with, loosely inserted, an additional print of “La Source”, exhibition announcement. Rogerson 36. £400
Buckland Wright (John). Surreal Times. The abstract engravings and wartime letters of John Buckland Wright. Introduction by Christopher Buckland Wright. Frontispiece, colour and mostly black-and-white plates and illustrations, some tipped-in. The Fleece Press, Denby Dale, 2000. First Edition. One of 266 copies, being one of 210 in quarter cloth. Set in Van Dijck by Peter Sanderson at the Whittington Press on Magnani mouldmade. Printed in red and black, title-page hand-coloured in yellow. Folio. Brown quarter cloth, patterned boards with the artist’s monogram repeated, spine with printed label, by Smith Settle. Fine copy, as new, in slipcase. Rogerson 50. £300
Buckland Wright (John). Endeavours and Experiments. John Buckland Wright’s essays in woodcut and colour engraving, together with other blocks remaining in his studio. Edited by Christopher Buckland Wright. Wood-engraved frontispiece, colour and black-and-white plates and illustrations throughout, some tipped-in. The Fleece Press, Upper Denby, 2004. First Edition. One of 300 copies, this being one of 150 in quarter cloth. Set in Modern No. 7 by Peter Sanderson at the Whittington Press on Magnani Velata avorio ‘Biblos’. Printed in red and black. Folio. Light brown quarter cloth with patterned boards from a design by the artist, spine with printed label, by Smith Settle. Fine copy, as new. in slipcase. Rogerson 56. £300
Buckland Wright (John). To Beauty. John Buckland Wright’s Work with Joseph Ishill of the Oriole Press. By Christopher Buckland Wright. Wood-engraved frontispiece and illustrations, tipped-in plates. The Fleece Press, Upper Denby, [2007]. First Edition. One of 246 copies. Set in Garamond on Saunders mouldmade. Printed in yellow and black. Reddish-brown quarter cloth, marbled boards by Enrico Ricciardi, spine with printed label, by Smith Settle. Fine copy, as new, in solander box, spine with printed label. Rogerson 62. £200
Buckland Wright (John). Sensuous Lines; a catalogue raisonné of the intaglio prints of John Buckland Wright. Compiled and introduced by Christopher Buckland Wright. Profusely illustrated with plates and illustrations, some tipped-in, some folding. The Fleece Press, Upper Denby, 2014. First Edition. One of 366 copies, being one of 220 in quarter cloth with an original tipped-in copper engraving ‘Venus Calling the Sea Gods’ as frontispiece. On Stow Ivory Vol. 13. Printed in red and black. Oblong 4to. Red quarter cloth, false Suminagashi marbled paper boards, specially made by Antonio Véles Celemin of Madrid. Fine copy, as new, in slipcase. Rogerson 73. £280
Click to access centenary%20catalogue.pdf
The sculptor, type designer and engraver Eric Gill is far more problematic, much as I love his work. We have handled a great deal of it and had these original woodblocks in the aforementioned catalogue.
Gill (Eric). Original woodblock, initialled, seated Madonna and child with words “Peace and Good Will To Men” around the edges and “Christmas 1937” at the foot, with stand. 14.9 x 8.2 cm. Skelton P932. £7,500
This was produced for the Peace Pledge Union. Together with a print from the block, printed text on the verso “O poor little one tost with tempest …” inscribed by Gill “love from Eric & Mary Gill”.
Gill (Eric). Original woodblock, Lovers on a Bank, 1924, used in Sonnets and Verses. 4.5 x 7.5 cm at tallest and widest points. Skelton P288. £4,000
The biography by Fiona McCarthy published in 1989 revealed that he was a serial sexual abuser of his daughters, his sisters and even his dog. It is scarcely possible to avoid his work though: the beautifully spare Gill Sans font is everywhere, from Penguin Books to the railways. This raises the age-old question of whether we can and/or should separate the artist from his or her work. I think it is unanswerable, at least I don’t have an answer.
We have two copies now of W.H. Auden’s notorious ‘The Platonic Blow’, aka ‘A Gobble Poem’ one an unauthorised edition of 300 copies published by the Fuck You Press in New York in 1965, and another by Fuck Books Unlimited from 1967. It is about what it sounds as though it is about and is too explicit to print here.
Gavin Ewart is another poet whose work can reasonably described as in the genre of ‘saucy’ and certainly fun, but also in comparison with, say, Herrick, often rather trite. He gave my father a manuscript fair copy of ‘To a Plum-Coloured Bra Displayed in Marks & Spencer’. Then there are the extremely smutty limericks of Norman Douglas, published in 1928 with a mock, tongue-in-cheek scholarly apparatus. Our differently titled edition is below. They are fun but one can only read so many before they begin to wear thin (there are a lot of them). I have read some Henry Miller though which is properly disturbing (Quiet Days in Clichy).
The libertine John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), produced vast quantities of bawdy and explicit verse with none of the euphemistic conceits of say, John Donne (whose brilliance as a poet cannot, for me, be outshone, with the possible exception of Gerard Manley Hopkins). He draws on a tradition though which goes right back to Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and indeed the poetry of Ovid and Martial, best known for his scandalous epigrams published between AD 86 and 103. John Wilkes (1725-1797), member of the Hellfire Club known for debauched meetings held at one point in tunnels and caves under West Wycombe Hill (well worth a visit) was also not afraid to create rude poetry. Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rabelais can hardly go unmentioned here. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, popularly known as Fanny Hill by John Cleland was published in 1748 and 1749, it’s legacy very much still present. My Secret Life by ‘Walter’ is an equally well-known enormous eleven-volume memoir of the author’s endless sexual encounters in the late nineteenth century.
There are of course many, many others but it cannot be ignored that almost all of the writers of such material are men. But not exclusively. I dug out my ancient paperback copy of Making Love, The Picador Book of Erotic Verse, 1978, edited by Alan Bold and found a poem by an author whose archive we handled many years ago, Wendy Perriam. Entitled ‘A Silent Movie’ it is both furious and filthy.
I’ll conclude with ‘The Geranium’ by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1761-1816). It is very rude indeed. And beautiful.
In the close covert of a grove
By nature formed for scenes of love,
Said Susan in a lucky hour:
‘Observe yon sweet geranium flower.
How straight upon its stalk it stands,
And tempts our violating hands,
Whilst the soft bud, as yet unspread,
Hangs down its pale declining head.
Yet soon as it is ripe to blow,
The stems shall rise, the head shall glow.’
‘Nature,’ said I, ‘my lovely Sue,
To all her followers lends a clue.
Her simple laws themselves explain
As links of one continued chain;
For her the mysteries of creation
Are but the works of generation.
Yon blushing, strong, triumphant flower
Is in the crisis of its power:
But short, alas, its vigorous reign;
He sheds his seed, and drops again.
The bud that hangs in pale decay
Feels not, as yet, the plastic ray.
Tomorrow’s sun shall bid him rise,
Then, too, he sheds his seed, and dies.
But words, my love, are vain and weak;
For proof, let bright example speak.’
Then straight before the wondering maid
The tree of life I gently laid.
‘Observe, sweet Sue, his drooping head,
How pale, how languid, and how dead.
Yet let the sun of thy bright eyes
Shine but a moment, it shall rise.
Let but the dew of thy soft hand
Refresh the stem, it straight shall stand.
Already, see, it swells, it grows,
Its head is redder than the rose,
Its shriveled fruit, of dusky hue,
Now glows—a present fit for Sue.
The balm of life each artery fills,
And in o’erflowing drops distils.’
‘Oh, me!’ cried Susan, ‘When is this?
What strange tumultuous throbs of bliss!
Sure, never mortal till this hour
Felt such emotion at a flower!
Oh, serpent, cunning to deceive,
Sure ’tis this tree that tempted Eve.
The crimson apples hang so fair
Alas! what woman could forbear?’
‘Well hast thou guessed, my love,’ I cried,
‘It is the tree by which she died –
The tree which could alone content her.
All nature, Susan, seeks the centre.
Yet let us still poor Eve forgive,
It’s the tree by which we live.
For lovely women still it grows,
And in the centre only blows.
But chief for thee it spreads its charms,
For paradise is in thy arms …’
I ceased, for nature kindly here
Began to whisper in her ear,
And lovely Sue lay softly panting
While the geranium tree was planting,
’Til in the heat of amorous strife
She burst the mellow tree of life.
‘Oh, heaven!’ cried Susan with a sigh,
‘The hour we taste – we surely die.
Strange raptures seize my fainting frame,
And all my body glows with flame.
Yet let me snatch one parting kiss
To tell my love I die with bliss –
That pleased thy Susan yields her breath;
Oh, who would live, if this be death?’
These are two fantastic, free online literary resources:
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