“The Vote,” by Ralph Knevet from Another World Than This (1657)

The Vote

The helmet now an hive for bees becomes,
And hilts of swords may serve for spiders’ looms;
   Sharp pikes may make
   Teeth for a rake;
And the keen blade, th’ arch enemy of life.
Shall be degraded to a pruning knife.
   The rustic spade
   Which first was made
For honest agriculture, shall retake
Its primitive employment, and forsake
   The rampires steep
   And trenches deep.
Tame conies¹ in our brazen guns shall breed.
Or gentle doves their young ones there shall feed.
   In musket barrels
   Mice shall raise quarrels
For their quarters. The ventriloquious drum,
(Like lawyers in vacations) shall be dumb.
   Now all recruits.
   But those of fruits.
Shall be forgot; and th’ unarmed soldier
Shall only boast of what he did whilere.
   In chimneys’ ends
   Among his friends.

¹ conies: rabbits

Ralph Knevet (160O-1671) was an follower of George Herbert who took orders during the English Civil War, which clearly forms the background of this poem. It appears in Another World Than This, which is something of a commonplace book compiled by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from decades of their reading. In their introduction, they wrote,

The compilers of this anthology have tried not to cheat. They have, on the whole, adhered honourably to the underlinings they found they had already made in their own books on the shelves of their separate rooms. They had both been in the habit for many years of marking passages which particularly pleased them, and of scribbling an index for reference at the end of each book–as every true reader of books should train himself to do. The residue, as embodied in the following pages, thus represents the lifetime literary taste of two persons with somewhat different occupations in life; a taste pursued in each case from adolescence to middle age; yet so curiously homogeneous in its ultimate result, that in a sudden spirit of amused comparison they decided to pool their book-markings into one printed volume.

The short poems and brief prose excerpts collected in Another World Than This are laid out across the twelve months, providing not quite a year’s worth of daily readings. Their selections are, like Knevet’s poem, mostly obscure and mostly from centuries before theirs, and on the whole, vivid and memorable. An excellent bedside companion, you can find it in electronic format on the Internet Archive: Link.

The only collection of Knevet’s work, The shorter poems of Ralph Knevet, edited by Amy M. Charles, dates from 1967. It can be found in electronic format on the Open Library: Link.