"Should passion e'er his soul deform, / Serenely meet the bursting storm; / Never in wordy war engage, / Nor ever meet his rage with rage. / With all our sex's softening art / Recall the lost reason to his heart; / Thus calm the tempest in his breast, / And sweetly soothe his soul to rest."

— Clark [née Lewis], Esther (bap. 1716, d. 1794)


Date
1752
Metaphor
"Should passion e'er his soul deform, / Serenely meet the bursting storm; / Never in wordy war engage, / Nor ever meet his rage with rage. / With all our sex's softening art / Recall the lost reason to his heart; / Thus calm the tempest in his breast, / And sweetly soothe his soul to rest."
Metaphor in Context
Should passion e'er his soul deform,
Serenely meet the bursting storm;
Never in wordy war engage,
Nor ever meet his rage with rage.
With all our sex's softening art
Recall the lost reason to his heart;
Thus calm the tempest in his breast,
And sweetly soothe his soul to rest.
(ll. 69-76, p. 232 in Lonsdale)
Provenance
Reading
Citation
At least 8 entries in ECCO and ESTC (1752, 1757, 1787, 1788, 1789, 1794, 1796, 1799).

Reading Roger Lonsdale's Eighteenth Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989). Lonsdale writes, "'Advice to a Young Lady lately married', originally in the Bath Journal in 1752, was often reprinted in periodicals in the following decades and is also found in most commonplace-books of the period" (226).

See also Poems Moral and Entertaining, Written Long Since by Miss Lewis, then of Holt, Now, and for Thirty Years Past, the Wife of Mr. Robert Clark, of Tetbury. (With a Few Others Addressed to Her.) Published at the Request of Her Husband, for the Benefit of the Infirmary at Glocester, the Hospital at Bath, and the Sunday Schools at Tetbury. (Bath: Printed and sold by S. Hazard; sold also by G. G. J. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row, London; and by the booksellers of Bath, Bristol, Glocester, and Tetbury, 1789). <Link to ECCO>

Searching in ECCO I find the poem in The Muse in a Moral Humour (London, 1757) <Link to ECCO>, in Friendly Hints; Which, Being Rightly Observed, May Prove Very Conducive to the Mutual Happiness of Both Sexes in the Married State (Northampton, 1787) <Link to ECCO>, The Weekly Entertainer (Sherburne, January 21, 1788) <Link to ECCO>, it's adapted (or plagiarized) by Mrs. Pickering in Poems by Mrs. Pickering (Birmingham, 1794) [see printer's note, p. 51] <Link to ECCO>, it appears in Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments (1796) <Link to ECCO>, and in Amatory Pieces (Ludlow, 1799) <Link to ECCO>.
Date of Entry
07/23/2003

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.