Tea

 Yesterday was World Bee Day (not to be confused with World Bidet) – and, by chance, I had in my change a £1 coin I'd never seen before, with the face of our King on one side and on the other an attractive design featuring... two bees. Today – how they keep on coming – is International Tea Day. And why not? Tea, if properly made with good leaves and no milk, is a fine drink.
The poets have not had much to say about tea: there's Cowper's much-misquoted 'The cups that cheer but not inebriate', and this from Basho –
 
A monk sips morning tea.
It is quiet.
The chrysanthemum is flowering.

And then there's Wallace Stevens's 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon', from his astonishing first collection, Harmonium. This is not, it must be admitted, a poem about tea. It has a Wikipedia entry to itself, which I have battled my way through, emerging unenlightened and drained of all pleasure in life. So I return to the poem, which is a thing of beauty...

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


    Finally, and with apologies for lowering the tone, here is a lyric that is definitely about tea, sung by the great Jack Buchanan, and surely a fitting anthem for International Tea Day. His account of the genesis of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony is, I fear, unsound.