Poem of the Day: ‘On a Girdle’
For Edmund Waller’s Cavalier-era speaker, the girdle — a sash around his lover’s waist — signifies a delicate orbit simply circumscribing her body, all the reality that matters to him.

Those of us with short cultural memories might snicker a little at the idea of a poem about a girdle. We might remember our mothers or grandmothers armored in that unassailable twentieth-century undergarment. We might remember the old euphemism “foundations,” its suggestion of women’s clothing as an edifice, built on a base immovable as granite. (We might not consider “shapewear,” the current euphemism, much of an improvement.)
This sense of the word is not that of today’s birthday poet, Edmund Waller (1606–1687). For Waller’s Cavalier-era speaker, in this poem of three tetrameter abab quatrains, the girdle — a sash around his lover’s waist — signifies neither a foundation nor a shaper of what reality has to offer, but a delicate orbit simply circumscribing her body, all the reality that matters to him. Binding that sash at his temples, he carries with him in imagination, if not in fact, “all that’s good and all that’s fair.”
On a Girdle
by Edmund Waller
That which her slender waist confin’d,
Shall now my joyful temples bind;
No monarch but would give his crown,
His arms might do what this has done.
It was my heaven’s extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer,
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love,
Did all within this circle move.
A narrow compass, and yet there
Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair;
Give me but what this ribbon bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round.
___________________________________________
With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.