THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

praised the effects of tea and implied a connection between tea and woman, suggesting
the two humanized the man at the tea table:
I drink, and lo the kindly Streams arise,
Wine’s vapour flags, and soon subsides and dies.
The friendly Spirits brighten mine again,
Repel the Brute, and re-inthrone the Man.
The rising Charmer with a pleasing Ray
Dawns on the Mind, and introduces Day. 42
Similarly, William Cowper extolled the civilizing qualities of the tea ritual. In his poem,
“The Task,” Cowper described the quintessential tea table scene and lauded the tea table
as a refuge from the world:
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful ev’ning in. 43
While the female presence in Cowper’s poem is merely implied, this scene is, as historian
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace argues, “culturally encoded as . . . feminine.” Yet, this
feminized tea table also indicated privilege and leisure, thus the tea ritual provided an
opportunity for the upper-class woman to participate in the emerging world of goods. 44
42 Peter Motteux, A Poem in Praise of Tea (London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1712),
http://libproxy.uta.edu:2132/servlet/ECCO (accessed May 19, 2010), 7.
43 William Cowper, “The Task, Book IV,” in Cowper: Verse and Letters, ed. Brian Spiller
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968), 466.
44 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 28-29.
17