Cutty-sark (witch) "chemise", or "shirt". The earliest recorded literary usage of the term "cutty sark" (as opposed to older usage of the two separate words) is by Dougal Graham in c. 1779 (the year of his death): "A cutty sark of guide harn sheet, My mitter he pe spin, mattam." In Burns' 1791 poem Tam o' Shanter, the drunken Tam, riding home on his horse, happens upon a witches' dance. Among the dancing figures is a particularly beautiful young witch named Nannie (Scots pet-form of Anna), "ae winsome wench and wawlie" (line 164). She is wearing a "harn" (linen) "sark" (nightshirt) which
Tea (poem) troping of leaves through the collection". She suggests that the reference to Java may be significant not only because it was a center of tea-trade, but also because its sophisticated court culture at one time, notable for its subtleties and appreciation of artists, "made it the kind of culture that Stevens especially liked". She also suggests that the poem expresses "Stevens's delicately implicit trope of drinking tea as a metaphor for reading (ingesting a drink from leaves)." She notes that Stevens was a tea-fancier. Robert Buttel characterizes this poem as light, witty, and rococo, and as displaying compression, concentration, and