poetry and pr0n

I just spent a few minutes looking at the titles of the spam in my mailbox. There were the predictable offers to sell me Man-XL or to fix my manhood problems (parenthetically, I doubt whatever they're selling would fix my particular manhood problems).

But one message stood out as taking a slightly different approach. It was entitled "kindles in clothes a wantoness," which is a quotation from a vaguely misogynstic poem written by Robert Herrick around 1650 that we probably all had to read in high school.

It's not a bad poem. It's actually kind of clever, with an edgy rhyme scheme that echos its content about the charm of clothing in disarray. The theory being, I suppose, that a girl with loose shoelaces (or "shoestrings") is likely to be, uh, loose in other ways as well. However, it's an interesting, if unlikely, marketing technique, using a Cavalier (in both senses of the term) poet to promote "male enhancement medication."

But Herrick also wrote this:

Here a pretty baby lies
Sung asleep with lullabies:
Pray be silent and not stir
Th' easy earth that covers her.

Which is sweet and simple and which I liked even before I had any particular reason to.