Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce or, The Slave Trader in the Dumps by William Cowper was a very interesting read not just for the content, but for the way it was written as well.
Much like Swift's 'A Description of a City Shower,' this is a list poem comprised of eleven stanzas each of which contain three rhyming lines and two (or one, but I'll get to that later) lines (couplet) that rhyme at the end. It's structured much like a song in 4/4 time and (from personal attempts) best spoken/sung at between 88-116 bpm. It's very likely though I'm not entirely sure that this poem is based on a work song (songs or poems sung by slaves on the plantation to help them keep time with cane cutting), which is almost ironic coming from the mouth of the slave trader who is talking about the fact that he's losing his job.
The trader starts out by outlining the issue that he is facing - namely that his trading days are coming to an end, likely because of the abolition of slavery is nigh. The poem, written in 1788, is still a few years shy of the official end of slavery in England (1783 was the start of public interest in the end of the slave trade and 1807 was the official passing of the Slavery Abolition Act), but it is firmly entrenched in the ideas of abolition.
A pro-abolition agenda, however, was difficult for me to read in this poem the first time I got through it. The trader doesn't show remorse for his actions, in fact lamenting that "in vain I have studied an art so gainful to me," (35) and going on to discuss his own self-pity (40) because he will no longer be able to participate in the lucrative business of trading slaves off to sugar plantation owners. Cowper instead appears to want the reader to feel disgust and discomfort towards the trader. By listing all of the tools the trader knew how to use (his 'arts') on the slaves, such as his "curious assortment of dainty regales, to tickle the negroes with when the ship sails, fine chains for the neck and a cat with nine tails," (11-14) Cowper kind of makes the reader feel grossed out. He describes, for instance, thumb screws that "squeeze them so lovingly till the blood comes, they sweeten the temper like comfits (dried sugared fruits) or plums," (20-21) which just sounds off-putting, especially with the juxtaposition of the act of torture to words like 'loving' and various types of candies (the sugar for which, I'd like to mention, probably came from the same plantations the slaves worked on). Cowper's use of this highly contrasting language is what makes the poem sound off. It distances the reader from the trader, also, because the reader knows that the act of bleeding (as described in line 20) is not and cannot be associated with candy and sweetness. Like your friendly neighborhood grandpa with fifty skeletons in his attic, there's something definitively wrong with juxtaposing that kind of language that left me feeling like my skin was crawling and helped to drive home the pro-abolition ideas that Cowper discusses.
Besides other descriptions of torture offered in great detail but using language intended to soften the impact and the trader's continued acts of self-pity, there is one part of this poem that I just cannot wrap my mind around, and where most of my questions stem from:
What is the purpose of the repetition of 'Which nobody can deny, deny, Which nobody can deny (or &c)' throughout the poem? Specifically, what does it mean in context to the lines that precede each couplet? And, perhaps more importantly in my opinion, why '&c'? Was Cowper too lazy to finish out the couplet in each stanza so he left it alone? I don't think so, but why just tack on an 'et cetera' at the end of each stanza? What is the purpose of deliberately leaving off the second part of the couplet that we (or at least I) as the readers fill in automatically when the poem is read aloud?
The poem is indeed meant to sound off: the contrast between torture devices and sugary comfits was certainly designed to produce discomfort in his middle class readers, those he wanted to turn toward the abolitionist cause. The refrain works in a way similar to these juxtapositions: As the chorus suggests, "Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce" was intended to be sung to the tune of "For he's a jolly good fellow." This tune became popular in the early 18th century by association with the French song "Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre" ("Marlborough Has Left for the War"), a burlesque on the false report of the Duke of Marlborough's death at the battle of Malplaquet in 1709. So, it may be less of a work song than a joke, which again contrasts pointedly to the poem’s content of kidnapping, carrying and torturing enslaved Africans. In terms of the trader’s self pity, see the excerpts from David Hume and Adam Smith posted to Blackboard. Smith argues that we only feel pity for other people by imagining ourselves in their place—which the trader seems incapable of doing. His tortured feeling, the awl through his heart, seems connected only to his loss of profit because of the 1788 Bill for Regulating the Slave Trade. Cowper thus presents a very dark view of human nature, one that might even seem contradictory to the abolitionist agenda of the poem.
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