“Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret,” by Mary Leapor (1746)

Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret

Welcome, dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let Thou and I contented dwell!

But say, O whither haft thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.

Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.

Was it for This, O graceless Child!
Was it for This, you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.

I wonder how thy Time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King ?

But now I’ll keep you here secure :
No more you view the smoky Sky :
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.

From Poems Upon Several Occasions by the late Mrs. Leapor, of Brackley, in Northamptonshire, in two volumes printed by J. Roberts of Warwick Lane, London, 1751. Available in the Internet Library (Volume 1 and Volume 2).

The daughter of a gardener, Mary Leapor worked as a maid and was entirely self-taught. Yet she took to writing naturally and when she was dying of measles at the age of 24, asked her friend Bridget Freemantle, a rector’s daughter, to undertake a subscription to publish a collection of her poems and other writings with the aim of providing her aging father some money for his last years. It’s thanks to the success of Bridget’s enterprise that we can read Mary’s work today.

As Bridget writes in the introduction to the collection, Mary made no great claim for her poems:

She always call’d it being idle, and indulging her whimsical Humour, when she was employed in writing the humorous Parts of her Poems; and nothing could pique her more than Peoples imagining she took a great deal of Pains, or spent a great deal of Time, in such Composure; or that she set much Value upon them.

She told me, that most of them were wrote when cross Accidents happen’d to disturb her, purely to divert her Thoughts from dwelling upon what was disagreeable; and that it generally had the intended Effect, by putting her in a good Humour.

The play that was returned with the claret stain was the manuscript of her magnum opus, a play set in ancient Rome titled The Unhappy Father. Bridget also informs us that “Mrs. Leapor’s whole Library consisted of about sixteen or seventeen single Volumes, among which were Part of Mr. Pope’s Works, Dryden’s Fables, some Volumes of Plays, etc..”