Beautiful: Christian Wives Promising to Be Bouncy

The plumper the godlier?

I begin with a short poem:

Gifts

Fat is in cream as delight is in home:
Shaken, pumped, and whipped to foam,
Then sprayed on berries.

Berries are lips, the cream your hips,
I’ll take a spoonful and I’ll take a sip,
Feast upon you merry.

The fruit is all you’ve given me,
Cream’s the riches I’ve given thee.

I read the above poem at a homeschooling conference specifically for women. I’m still grateful for the invitation, they were generous with the time and I was able to read several poems. Gifts, I now confess, I read by accident. I was flipping through and stopped at the wrong poem…and once I realized what I was reading, I went for it.

A sexy poem in front of two hundred sexy women.

I’m just glad my wife was there. It is, after all, directed to her. And actually, although I would never have chosen to do it that way, once I was committed it was kind of erotic to look right at her in the front row and proclaim her sexiness in front of all those witnesses.

The poem was received well.

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Anyway, this post is about being buxom.

"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other."

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

We ate, we drank, we slept, we loved. If you can keep it that simple, thanks be to God.

According to John Thrupp in The Anglo-Saxon Home: A History of the Domestic Institutions and Customs of England From the Fifth to the Eleventh Centuries, wives promised to be "bonny and buxom at bed and at board".

The bride's vow, closely related to today's traditional vows, is "I take thee John to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health, to be bonny and buxom in bed and at board till death do us part, and thereto I plight thee my troth."

A "troth", by the way, is pledged loyalty and faithfulness, as in "betrothal".

The groom's vow was briefer, less beautiful, and less alliterative. "I take thee Alice to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold, at bed and at board, for fairer for fouler, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health, till death us do part." It's interesting to note as an aside here that the groom's vow contains a promise to stay with her even if she gets old and wrinkly and ugly.

Just saying the words of the wife's vow is a pleasure. They're so bouncy! Try it, out loud: "Bonny and buxom in bed and at board." Or maybe "Sassy and sweet in sack and at seat." Sweet and bouncy...and bouncy goes so well with "buxom." We all know what we think first when we hear the word "buxom".

I'll bet you don't think "obedient and tractable". Yep. That's the first definition at Merriam-Webster, although it's plainly labeled as obsolete. The word is from Middle English buxsum, from Old English būhsum; akin to Old English būgan to bend, or bow.

1. obsolete a: obedient, tractable b: offering little resistance : flexible <wing silently the buxom air — John Milton>

2. archaic: full of gaiety

3. vigorously or healthily plump; specifically: full-bosomed

As you are a man, immediately upon reading buxom you had already thought "full-bosomed", but that's the last thing mentioned by the dictionary nerds, who are men we should all strive to be more like.

The oath the bride is giving is one of Christian submission to her husband. The most awesome thing about that is that we're talking about cheerful obedience. You could even put a hyphen in there and turn that into one word. So we're talking about cheerful-obedience, a much bally-hooed but seldom seen Christian quality. Buxom meant obedient and flexible, but it must have even then been a word charged with good cheer, since it followed "bonny" so closely, and since it evolved to mean "gaiety" and "big bouncing breasts".

Christian wives are called to cheerful obedience in bed and at the table. There are a lot of distractions, and lots of other work, but bed and table are at the core of practical marriage. Thank God for this every day, o you husbands. And pray that you be made worthy.

Christ have mercy upon us.