A pain which every happy night
You cure with ease and with delight;
With pleasure, as the poet sings,
Too great for mortals less than kings. 
  Chloe, when on thy breast I lie,
Observes me with revengeful eye: 
If Chloe o’er thy heart prevails,
She’ll tear me with her desperate nails;
And with relentless hands destroy
The tender pledges of our joy. 
Nor have I bred a spurious race;
They all were born from thy embrace. 
  Consider, Strephon, what you do;
For, should I die for love of you,
I’ll haunt thy dreams, a bloodless ghost;
And all my kin, (a numerous host,)
Who down direct our lineage bring
From victors o’er the Memphian king;
Renown’d in sieges and campaigns,
Who never fled the bloody plains: 
Who in tempestuous seas can sport,
And scorn the pleasures of a court;
From whom great Sylla[2] found his doom,
Who scourged to death that scourge of Rome,
Shall on thee take a vengeance dire;
Thou like Alcides[3] shalt expire,
When his envenom’d shirt he wore,
And skin and flesh in pieces tore. 
Nor less that shirt, my rival’s gift,
Cut from the piece that made her shift,
Shall in thy dearest blood be dyed,
And make thee tear thy tainted hide.

[Footnote 1:  The solution is, phtheirhiasis morbus pedicularis.  With this piece may be read Peter Pindar’s epic, “The Lousiad.”—­W.  E. B_.]

[Footnote 2:  Plutarch tells how Sylla’s body was so corrupted with these vermin, that they streamed from him into every place:  pasan estheta kai loutron kai aponimma kai sition anapimplasthai tou reumatos ekeinon kai tes phthoras. tosouton exenthei. “Vita Syllae,” xxxvi.—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 3:  Hercules, who died from wearing the shirt (given him by his wife as a charm against his infidelities) stained with the blood of Nessus, the centaur, whom Hercules had slain with a poisoned arrow.  Ovid, “Epist.  Heroid.  Deianira Herculi,” and “Metam.,” lib. ix, 101.—­W.  E. B.]

A MAYPOLE. 1725

Deprived of root, and branch and rind,
Yet flowers I bear of every kind: 
And such is my prolific power,
They bloom in less than half an hour;
Yet standers-by may plainly see
They get no nourishment from me. 
My head with giddiness goes round,
And yet I firmly stand my ground: 
All over naked I am seen,
And painted like an Indian queen. 
No couple-beggar in the land
E’er join’d such numbers hand in hand. 
I join’d them fairly with a ring;
Nor can our parson blame the thing. 
And though no marriage words are spoke,
They part not till the ring is broke;
Yet hypocrite fanatics cry,
I’m but an idol raised on high;
And once a weaver in our town,
A damn’d Cromwellian, knock’d me down. 
I lay a prisoner twenty years,
And then the jovial cavaliers
To their old post restored all three—­
I mean the church, the king, and me.