Poem of the Week 2024/5

On Snuff-Taking

Custom, in this small article I find

What strong ascendance thou hast o'er the mind.

My friend's advice the first inducements were:

"Take it," said she, "it will your spirits cheer."

All resolute the offered drug to take,

But in the trial sickened with my hate.

By repetition I was brought to bear,

Then rather liked, now love it too, too dear.

Be careful, oh, my soul! how thou let'st in

The baneful poison of repeated sin;

Never be intimate with any crime,

Lest Custom make it amiable in time.

– Elizabeth Teft

As a lover of old novels, I was familiar with the concept of taking snuff, but realizing how imperfect my knowledge is I turned to that Sibylline oracle of our times, Wikipedia, & read what turned out to be their very interesting entry on snuff. It turns out I was mistaken in thinking that its purpose was to induce sneezing; apparently that was looked down upon as the mark of an amateur or a beginner. & many snuffs were flavored in some way. & – but this was no surprise, as it's a tobacco product – it is addictive & causes cancers, a link noted back in the eighteenth century, when this poem was written.

What I love about this poem is that its subject is very current – I think we've all heard people talk about their first use of some drug, legal or not (beer, marijuana, all the usual suspects), usually urged by what used to be called "peer pressure", & how they didn't like it at first, yet (somewhat inexplicably) they kept on trying, until they ended up not only loving it, but needing it – but the poem's treatment of the subject is echt eighteenth century: the moral reflections turned into general truths (the way Custom, or Habit, rules our behaviors, mental as well as physical, a theme beloved by Proust, & the warning to avoid vices lest we grow inured to them); the regular beat of the iambic pentameter lines; the rhyming couplets (though she does, unusually for her time, use a slant rhyme (take / hate); this doesn't seem like a case in which the pronunciation used to make it a perfect rhyme, as with Pope in The Rape of the Lock when he rhymes tea / obey); the vocative address to her soul, as the guardian against & potential victim of sin; in fact, the reference to sin, along with the rest of the vocabulary (soul. baneful poison. amiable); the whole sense that moderation & balance are best, even for poets (what a contrast with the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth & early nineteenth century, who welcomed drug-induced hallucinations as pathways to creativity!)

I took this poem from Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Roger Lonsdale.