Life & Wisdom Quote by John Cleveland

Cleveland’s opening feint - “I am no Poet here” - is less modesty than a tactical retreat. He’s stripping himself of the ornamental obligations of verse so he can smuggle in something messier: grief that refuses to be prettified. The line turns on a deliberately homely metaphor. A pen isn’t a lyre or a muse’s instrument; it’s a “spout,” a bit of plumbing. Tears become “rain water,” ordinary runoff. In one stroke, Cleveland demotes both poetic inspiration and emotional display, making sorrow sound unglamorous, bodily, unavoidable.

That choice matters in a mid-17th-century literary culture where public feeling was expected to arrive dressed up - elegy as performance, piety as polish. Cleveland’s subtext is that certain moments break the contract. When he writes, he isn’t crafting; he’s leaking. The pen becomes a conduit, not a tool of mastery. It’s a small but sharp moral claim: authenticity is not a higher style, it’s the abandonment of style.

Context sharpens the edge. Cleveland, a Royalist poet navigating civil war, defeat, and political instability, knew how language could be weaponized or censored. This line quietly dodges rhetoric’s usual swagger. Instead of argument, he offers evidence: the body’s overflow. The result is a paradox he exploits well - a poet insisting he isn’t performing poetry, in a couplet so vividly engineered you can hear the drip.