Poetry Codex

Metaphysical & Cavalier

John Cleveland

1613–1658

John Cleveland (1613–1658) was an English Royalist poet and satirist, a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, who lost his post when the Civil War came and served the King's cause with his pen. He is best known for his sharp political satires against Scots, Parliament men and Puritans, and for love poems in the most extravagant 'strong-lined' conceited style.

Cleveland's verse was enormously popular in the 1650s and was reprinted many times, though the collections that carry his name also contain pieces by other hands. The text here follows George Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), using the poems he prints as Cleveland's and leaving out those he marks as disputed.

Poems (34)

  1. To the State of Love. Or the Senses' Festival
  2. The Hecatomb to His Mistress
  3. Upon Sir Thomas Martin
  4. On the Memory of Mr. Edward King, Drowned in the Irish Seas
  5. Upon an Hermaphrodite
  6. The Author's Hermaphrodite
  7. Square-Cap
  8. Upon Phillis Walking in a Morning Before Sun-rising
  9. Upon a Miser That Made a Great Feast, and the Next Day Died for Grief
  10. A Young Man to an Old Woman Courting Him
  11. To Mrs. K. T.
  12. A Fair Nymph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her
  13. A Dialogue Between Two Zealots upon the &c. in the Oath
  14. Smectymnuus, or the Club-Divines
  15. The Mixed Assembly
  16. The King's Disguise
  17. The Rebel Scot
  18. The Scots' Apostasy
  19. Rupertismus
  20. Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford
  21. An Elegy upon the Archbishop of Canterbury
  22. Mark Antony
  23. The Author's Mock Song to Mark Antony
  24. How the Commencement Grows New
  25. The Hue and Cry After Sir John Presbyter
  26. The Antiplatonic
  27. Fuscara, or the Bee Errant
  28. To Julia to Expedite Her Promise
  29. Upon Princess Elizabeth, Born the Night Before New Year's Day
  30. The General Eclipse
  31. Upon the King's Return from Scotland
  32. An Elegy on Ben Jonson
  33. News from Newcastle
  34. An Elegy upon King Charles the First, Murdered Publicly by His Subjects

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