The signs of the Zodiac, learned men say,
Are confin’d to the regions above,
And none yet imagin’d they serve to display
The tokens terrestrial of love;
But my muse, ever merry, will sing to explain,
Tho’ learning look grave and austere,
We cherish the whim of each whirligig brain,
Starch’d gravity enters not here.
Sign Aries, then maids, is your ram or lew’d tup,
A rich pond’rous bag ’twixt his legs,
With juicy-joy pregnant, and closely tied up,
Is the essence of oysters and eggs;
In figure ’tis Cupid with arrow and bow,
Sagittarius, that archer divine,
Letting fly at the target of yielding Virgo,
To prick rouge virginity’s sign.
By twin bubbies, sign Gemini’s amply express’d,
In a maiden just leaning to man,
The ripe blooming fruit of the firm heaving breast,
The flame of love’s passion doth fan;
When exhausted in raptures, how charming to lie
’Twixt love’s hillocks, gay mortals delight,
Feel the heave, hear the sigh, mark the languishing eye,
Which the Signum Salutis invite.
Sign Scorpio, no doubt, is an evil that fled
From Pandora’s combustible box,
A sign you may tell by the tail or the head
Of that hell-born disease call’d the pox.
Sign Cancer’s the cod-clinging crab we all know,
And wifely clings he; for you’ll find
He’s ever in danger, above or below,
Of destruction by water or wind.
Sign Capricorn goatish old Q. doth denote,
Or them who of lust strongly smell,
Teaze, fumble and feel, drivel, dangle, and doat,
On the bawd, or the old batter’d belle;
Sign Pisces too plainly refers to the thing
Sweet and clean, kept by laudable art,
But the bidet neglected, we wind the old ling,
And turn from the fishified part.
Sign Taurus alludes to Old English beef-steaks;
For this cabbaging, love-feeding food,
Gives vigour to age, is a bracer of rakes,
And enriches the brain and the blood;
This Taurus may mean too, the lusty big Pat,
Who bellows about London streets,
whose nose is eternally smelling old hat,
And who mounts ev’ry cow that he meets.
Sign Libra’s the balance that ought to prevail,
In an act we delight to enjoy,
For a feather we’re told will turn nature’s near scale,
When we bob for a girl or a boy;
Aquarius appears as the word doth instruct,
An object, who once was a man,
An Italian castrato’s cut-down aqueduct,
A mere spout for a watering pan.
Brave Leo the lion’s our national sign,
Where foreigners come for good fare,
True freedom, true friendship, good humour, good wine,
We hope they will ever find here;
Our houses alone are the Garter and Star,
Jolly Bacchus the sign of the tun,
Where Venus receives us with smiles at the bar,
To fill up life’s measure of fun.
CHORUS.
But the sign of all signs, good and truly divine,
Is a bumper of heart-cheering generous wine.