Who Are the Grape Poets?
Classical currants in modern poetry
If I ever get to be Oxford Professor of Poetry, this is the first lecture I will give:
[Surveys audience over half-moon spectacles. Stops chewing. Spits pips.]
Who are the grape poets? What are their grape poems? And is grape poetry possible any more? These are questions people often ask me — at least, I think that’s what they’re asking.
Grape poetry, of course, begins with the classical world. The opening lines of Virgil’s Georgics — here translated by John Dryden — promise us sound advice on growing our own:
What makes a plenteous Harvest, when to turn
The fruitful Soil, and when to sowe the Corn;
The Care of Sheep, of Oxen, and of Kine;
And how to raise on Elms the teeming Vine
In Book II, Virgil goes deeper into Roman viniculture, invoking the god Bacchus:
For clust’ring Grapes are thy peculiar Care:
For thee large Bunches load the bending Vine,
And the last Blessings of the Year are thine.
To thee his Joys the jolly Autumn owes,
When the fermenting Juice the Vat o’erflows.
Come strip with me, my God, come drench all o’er
Thy Limbs in Must of Wine, and drink at ev’ry Pore.
(It will be no surprise to admirers of Keats’ “To Autumn” to know he had been reading Dryden’s Georgics the summer before he wrote his great — though grapeless — poem.)
Further on, Virgil enumerates the different wine-making varieties in what we might call grape detail, concluding with the outsized “Bumastus”, whose Greek etymology — βούμασθος (boúmasthos, “having large breasts”), from βοῦς (boûs, “cow”) + μαστός (mastós, “breast”) — Dryden draws out with a farmyard simile not in the Latin:
Nor must Bumastus his old Honours lose,
In length and largeness like the Dugs of Cows
Some purists, of course, maintain that classical grape poetry is the vinest ever written. But ask an English reader to name a grape poet and it is likely they will think of Keats. Grapes were a seasonal luxury in the England of two hundred years ago, which may be why Keats’ “Ode to Melancholy” (1820) begins with some ominous advice about the hazards of home-brew:
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine
By the final stanza of the poem, the poet has (we hope) identified an edible grape — but it is one that, upon eating, turns sour:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
I don’t know if anyone here has ever tried to burst a grape against their palate using only their tongue — but let me tell you, it is not easy. Perhaps Keats was thinking of a smaller, more delicate variety than the common-or-garden supermarket table grapes with which I was experimenting: the tiny Champagne grape, maybe, which weighs in at the other end of the scale to the Bumastus. But I am not the only critic to feel that there is something odd about Keats’ lone grape. As Marjorie Levinson comments:
The pleasure of grapes is, literally, the pleasure of grapes: the natural, plural, clustered condition of the grape. It is, further, the pleasure of a mouth, a throat, and a stomach full of grapes.
Levinson’s point is that “a single grape not swallowed” is a very different kind of “delight”; the ingenious joy, perhaps, of someone who has come to the end of the bunch, or wasn’t able to afford a bunch large enough to fill a stomach in the first place, so is savouring them one by one. In October 1820, not long after he wrote his odes, and not long before he died, Keats lay in quarantine on a ship in Naples harbour, having travelled to Italy in the hope that a warmer climate would alleviate his tuberculosis. Writing to the mother of his beloved, Fanny Brawne, he attempts to sound cheerful as he sends greetings to the family — and it is the heroic act of hurling a large amount of grapes from Italy to Britain that comes to mind as an image of this:
O what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world—I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly—O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints! My Love again to Fanny—tell Tootts—I wish I could pitch her a basket of grapes—
By the Victorian era, the pleasure of eating a bunch of grapes in polite society had become a trial of decorum. Grape scissors were invented for snipping off fruit from a bunch at the table, and a book called The Manners and Tone of Good Society (1879) described how to eat them gracefully, by performing a kind of conjuring trick:
When eating grapes, the half closed hand should be placed to the lips and the stones and skins adroitly allowed to fall into the fingers and quickly placed on the side of the plate, the back of the hand concealing the manoeuvre from view.
It was in such a context of delicacy and restraint that our next grape poet, Christina Rossetti, allowed the young Laura, in Goblin Market (1862), to be led into sensuous temptation by “pellucid grapes without one seed”:
