"Neither do thou lust after that tawny weed tobacco"
About this Quote
Jonson’s line snaps like a ruler across the knuckles: desire itself is the problem, not just the habit. “Neither do thou lust” borrows the moral grammar of the Ten Commandments, yoking tobacco to adultery and covetousness. That’s the clever sting. He isn’t merely warning about smoke in the lungs (early modern medicine barely had that language); he’s policing appetite, training the reader to feel that craving is a species of spiritual failure.
“Tawny weed” does a lot of covert work. “Weed” was a common term for herb, but it also hints at something invasive, a plant that colonizes the body and the household. “Tawny” evokes foreignness and stain: the brown of dried leaf, the discoloration of teeth and fingers, but also the racialized, exotic aura attached to imported commodities. Tobacco arrives in England as part of the New World pipeline - fashionable, expensive, and ideologically messy. It’s both status symbol and moral panic.
Jonson, a poet with a satirist’s ear for social pretension, targets the performance surrounding tobacco as much as the substance. To “lust after” it is to advertise oneself as captive to novelty, to court a kind of self-inflicted servitude. The rhythm of the phrase, with its archaic “thou,” mimics sermon and scripture, weaponizing piety as social critique. In a London newly addicted to commodities and “newfangled” pleasures, Jonson turns a whiff of smoke into an argument about discipline, masculinity, and the anxiety that England’s expanding world is expanding its vices faster than its virtues.
“Tawny weed” does a lot of covert work. “Weed” was a common term for herb, but it also hints at something invasive, a plant that colonizes the body and the household. “Tawny” evokes foreignness and stain: the brown of dried leaf, the discoloration of teeth and fingers, but also the racialized, exotic aura attached to imported commodities. Tobacco arrives in England as part of the New World pipeline - fashionable, expensive, and ideologically messy. It’s both status symbol and moral panic.
Jonson, a poet with a satirist’s ear for social pretension, targets the performance surrounding tobacco as much as the substance. To “lust after” it is to advertise oneself as captive to novelty, to court a kind of self-inflicted servitude. The rhythm of the phrase, with its archaic “thou,” mimics sermon and scripture, weaponizing piety as social critique. In a London newly addicted to commodities and “newfangled” pleasures, Jonson turns a whiff of smoke into an argument about discipline, masculinity, and the anxiety that England’s expanding world is expanding its vices faster than its virtues.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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