Tea at Trianon: Poetry about Food

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Poetry about Food

From the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney:

[Heaney] was one of the few poets in the 21st century to bridge the gap between critical success and popular appeal, and he did it by writing poems filled with fleshy physicality. It’s no surprise, then, that he could write about food like the best of them. One of his more famous poems, Blackberry Picking, made an almost holy experience out of the activity: “You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it.” He would have been dubbed a locavore, too, if the term had been invented when he started out, and he was definitely a forager. Writing about an elderberry shrub in his Glanmore Sonnets series, he calls the fruit “a swart caviar of shot, / A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple. … It is shires dreaming wine.” The food Heaney tended to celebrate was uncomplicated, earthy and delicious, much like his writing. (Read more.)