Bottle and Potato Traced to the Source

 

Recently Crooked Timber cited two lines of doggerel by Michael Hamburger:

To Einstein as to Plato,
Time was a hot potato.

For English majors of a certain age, this calls to mind "Survey of Literature, a late-Twenties jingle by the once-respected John Crowe Ransom:

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roast beef and potato.
A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

This in turn evokes Monty Python's more recent "Bruce" sketch:

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.....

As it happens, in Cockney rhyming slang "Aristotle" supposedly means "arse: "ass" --> "glass" --> "bottle" --> "Aristotle"; it was then shortened to "aris",  which is close enough to "arse" to make the whole story seem a little fishy.

No one remembers who Owen Wister (1888-1938) was anymore, but his version almost certainly  predates Ransom's:

Said Aristotle unto Plato,
"Have another sweet potato?
"Said Plato unto Aristotle,
"Thank you, I prefer the bottle.”

This Gilbert and Sullivan couplet from Patience (1881) is, in turn, earlier than Wister's squib, but it misses the Aristotle / bottle rhyme:

Then a sentimental passion--of a vegetable fashion--must excite your languid spleen--
An attachment a la Plato--for a bashful young potato, or a not too French French bean!

The locus classicus of these rhymes is probably here, from one of England's most-renowned poets:

I'll call the work "Longinus o'er a Bottle,
Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle."....
 
By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault,
By Fénélon, by Luther, and by Plato;
By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rousseau,
Who knew this life was not worth a potato.....


Lord Byron, Don Juan:
Canto I, #204;
Canto VII, #4.

If anyone knows of any earlier appearances of this rhyme, please send them by.
 

 

Update: Conrad Roth of the most excellent Varieties of Unreligious Experience traces the rhyme to Ronsard:
 
Je pense, Madame, que c'estoit Platon
Qui a dict, sans riant, qu'un potaton
As son seul Potaton danz le ciel--

Et je suis sur, d'ailleurs, qu'Aristote
Voyoit Dieu danz une bouteille, ou sous une botte,
Et en tout ce qu'est reel.

I suspect that there may have been an even earlier English original, because Ronsard rhymes Aristote with botte (boot), while still  referring to the bouteille within which Aristotle sees God.

Possible candidates include Raleigh, who is wrongly thought to have brought the potato to England, and his friend Spenser.  My look at the searchable online versions of these poets found no potatoes, however.

Further Update:

Conrad was hoaxing me. It didn't sound like Ronsard to me either, but my guess was that he was one of those many-faceted early modern personalities -- like Clement Marot, who was a Villon scholar, prescriptive grammarian, Bible translator, soldier, light poet, and lewd Protestant.

 

Hamburger / Ransom  / Bruce  / Cockney / Wister / Patience  / Byron

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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