In THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, the world's oldest epic, we read early on that Enkidu, the wild man who was the original wild boy growing up among the beasts, had hair "thick as barley" and "with the gazelles he grazed on grasses." Of course, as in 5000 years of stories ever since, Shamhat the harlot sees this bad boy and sets out to make him hers. It takes seven days and seven nights in the sack at which point she tells him that it is time to go to the temple Eanna where "like a man, [Enkidu] will find a place for yourself" with other men become "engaged in labors of skill." No more grazing either. Arriving at their destination, bread and ale are set before him. The harlot teaches him to eat and drink, at which point he consumes seven goblets of ale. In what surely one of the earliest accounts of inebriation in world literature: "His mood became free, he started to sing,/ his heart grew merry, his face lit up." Did I mention that Shamhat then arranges for a barber and gets Enkidu cleaned up and "oiled"? You cannot, as they say, make this stuff up.
From time immemorial food imagery has fueled both the metaphoric life of poetry and helped define character and personal taste, what we like and dislike and that to which we aspire. Flash forward to 17th century England and poet Robert Herrick. Herrick, apparently quite the character in real life, frequently charged his epigrams and secular poems with the language of food. "Love Palatable" describes a kiss that joins body and soul. He gets practical with his wit in "Diet": "If wholesome Diet can re-cure a man,/ What need of Physick, or Physitian?" Poems that extol his beloved Julia are sensual and playfully erotic. In "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast," we are asked:
Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red-Rose peeping through a white?
Or else a Cherrie (double grac't)
Within a Lillie? Center plac't?
Or ever marked the pretty beam,
A Strawberry shewes halfe drowned in Creame?
And Julia's leg is extolled with a Monty Python-ish excess of silliness: "Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty Leg,/ Which is white and hair-less as an egg." What else would one expect from a fellow who spent part of his brief time in the countryside purportedly teaching a pig to drink from a tankard?
American Ogden Nash delighted readers with his eccentric and singular muse from the late 20's to the time of his death in Baltimore in 1971. Everyone knows his "Reflections on Ice-Breaking": "Candy/ Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker." In 1989, his food poems were collected into a volume simply titled FOOD and illustrated by Etienne Delessert. I love this book and have giggled through it dozens of times. If left to my own devices I would quote it complete. In lieu of that, a short poem, "The Pioneer":
I seek in anonymity's cloister
Not him who ate the first raw oyster,
But one, who braving spikes and prickles,
The spine that stabs, the leaf that tickles,
With infinite patience and fortitude
Unveiled the artichoke as a food.
From time immemorial food imagery has fueled both the metaphoric life of poetry and helped define character and personal taste, what we like and dislike and that to which we aspire. Flash forward to 17th century England and poet Robert Herrick. Herrick, apparently quite the character in real life, frequently charged his epigrams and secular poems with the language of food. "Love Palatable" describes a kiss that joins body and soul. He gets practical with his wit in "Diet": "If wholesome Diet can re-cure a man,/ What need of Physick, or Physitian?" Poems that extol his beloved Julia are sensual and playfully erotic. In "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast," we are asked:
Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red-Rose peeping through a white?
Or else a Cherrie (double grac't)
Within a Lillie? Center plac't?
Or ever marked the pretty beam,
A Strawberry shewes halfe drowned in Creame?
And Julia's leg is extolled with a Monty Python-ish excess of silliness: "Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty Leg,/ Which is white and hair-less as an egg." What else would one expect from a fellow who spent part of his brief time in the countryside purportedly teaching a pig to drink from a tankard?
American Ogden Nash delighted readers with his eccentric and singular muse from the late 20's to the time of his death in Baltimore in 1971. Everyone knows his "Reflections on Ice-Breaking": "Candy/ Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker." In 1989, his food poems were collected into a volume simply titled FOOD and illustrated by Etienne Delessert. I love this book and have giggled through it dozens of times. If left to my own devices I would quote it complete. In lieu of that, a short poem, "The Pioneer":
I seek in anonymity's cloister
Not him who ate the first raw oyster,
But one, who braving spikes and prickles,
The spine that stabs, the leaf that tickles,
With infinite patience and fortitude
Unveiled the artichoke as a food.
And a tidbit from "The Parsnip": "Some people call the parsnip edible;/ Myself, I find this claim incredible." Seek these poems out in your local used bookstore or the library and then you can be the person chuckling to himself in front of the shelves from whom everyone else in the place is slowly backing away from.
Charles Seluzicki
Charles Seluzicki
0 comments:
Post a Comment