And wander in the meadows, or ascend
The mossy mountains, where the heavens bend
With lightest winds, to touch their paramour;
Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore,
Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea
Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy,—
Possessing and possessed by all that is
Within that calm circumference of bliss,
And by each other, till to love and live
Be one:—or, at the noontide hour, arrive
Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep
The moonlight of the expired night asleep,
Through which the awakened day can never peep;
A veil for our seclusion, close as night’s,
Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;
Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.
And we will talk, until thought’s melody
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die
In words, to live again in looks, which dart
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,
Harmonizing silence without a sound.
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in Passion’s golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
If any judgments are to be made, it is, I think, to Blake and the symbolic method that we must hand the apple. Carew’s Rapture is astonishingly brilliant, sharp, high-coloured; Shelley’s tireless flow of rich, not very precise eloquence produces, cumulatively (this fragment from Epipsychidion begins at the poem’s five hundred and fortieth line) its usual effect upon the hypnotized reader, who follows the hurrying words in a luxurious kind of hashish or peyotl trance. But both, it seems to me, fail to express the essential quality of what they describe. In this respect Ahania’s Lament is superior to either. By means of a series of intrinsically not very striking images Blake succeeds in rendering all the violence and intensity, all the enormity and supernaturalness of the erotic act. His secret consists in the choice, for his symbols, of images on the cosmic scale of grandeur. “The sons of eternity singing” remind us of the Miltonic heaven. “Mountain sport” and “eternal valleys” “my soft cloud of dew” and “showers of life on his harvests”—these suggest an immense and divinely luminous landscape. With the “sons of eternal joy” and “the daughters of life” we are back again in the realm of angelic ecstasy. For all its apparent vagueness and remoteness, the poem expresses what it has to express with an extraordinary force and precision.
In his account of the loves of Vulcan and Venus—a passage which Montaigne considered as the most movingly voluptuous in classical literature—Virgil resorts, at the end, to the cosmic image of lightning. But his main effect is produced by making a direct appeal to the reader’s own memory. Solitam flamman, notus calor—he calls upon us to do the work for ourselves—to reconstruct in our own minds the familiar scenes of well-known passion. It is a curious device, but surprisingly effective.
Perhaps the best accounts of physical passion are to be found in poems which are not about profane love at all. The writings of the mystics contain amazingly precise renderings of experiences which are, at any rate superficially, indistinguishable from the erotic experience. The following lines from the Canciones que hace el alma en la intima union de Dios by St. John of the Cross will serve as an example.
¡Oh, cauterio suave!
¡Oh, regalada llaga!
¡Oh, mano blanda! ¡Oh, toque delicado,
Que a vida eterna sabe,
Y toda deuda paga!
Matando, muerte en vida la has trocado.
¡Oh, lámparas de fuego,
En cuyos resplandores
Las profundas cavernas del sentido,
Que estaba oscuro y ciego,
Con extraños primores
Calor y luz dan junto a su querido!
Here the effect is obtained by combining a direct, if in parts somewhat exaggerated, statement of bodily sensations—cautery, wounds, delicate contacts—with symbolic images on the cosmic scale—eternity, death, lightning, caverns. The following lines by Crashaw require no comment; they are almost embarrassingly explicit.
Dear soul be strong!
Mercy will come here long
And bring his bosom fraught with blessings,
Flowers of never fading graces.
To make immortal dressings
For worthy souls, whose wise embraces
Store up themselves for Him, who is alone
The spouse of virgins and the Virgin’s Son.
But if the noble Bridegroom, when He come,
Shall find the loitering heart from home;
Leaving her chaste abode
To gad abroad
Among the gay mates of the god of flies;
To take her pleasure, and to play,
And keep the devil’s holiday;
To dance i’ the sunshine of some smiling
But beguiling
Sphere of sweet and sugared lies;
Some slippery pair
Of false, perhaps as fair,
Flattering but forswearing eyes;
Doubtless some other heart
Will get the start
Meanwhile, and stepping in before
Will take possession of the sacred store
Of hidden sweets and holy joys;
Words which are not heard with ears
(Those tumultuous shops of noise),
Effectual whispers, whose still voice
The soul itself more feels than hears;
Amorous languishments, luminous trances;
Sights which are not seen with eyes;
Spiritual and soul-piercing glances,
Whose pure and subtle lightning flies
Home to the heart, and sets the house on fire
And melts it down in sweet desire:
Yet does not stay
To ask the windows’ leave to pass that way;
Delicious deaths, soft exhalations
Of soul; dear and divine annihilations;
A thousand unknown rites
Of joys and rarefied delights;
An hundred thousand goods, glories and graces;
And many a mystic thing,
Which the divine embraces
Of the dear Spouse of spirits with them will bring;
For which it is no shame
That dull mortality must not know a name.
Of all this store
Of blessings, and ten thousand more
(If when He come
He find the heart from home)
Doubtless He will unload
Himself some otherwhere,
And pour abroad
His precious sweets
On the fair soul whom first He meets,
O fair! O fortunate! O rich! O dear!
O happy and thrice-happy she,
Dear selected dove
Who’er she be,
Whose early love
With wingèd vows
Makes haste to meet her morning Spouse,
And close with his immortal kisses;
Happy indeed who never misses
To improve that precious hour,
And every day
Seize her sweet prey,
All fresh and fragrant as He rises,
Dropping with a balmy shower
A delicious dew of spices;
O let the blissful heart hold fast
Her heavenly armful; she shall taste
At once ten thousand paradises;
She shall have power
To rifle and deflower
The rich and roseal spring of those rare sweets,
Which with a swelling bosom there she meets:
Boundless and infinite, bottomless treasures
Of pure inebriating pleasures.
Happy proof! she shall discover
What joy, what bliss,
How many heavens at once it is
To have her God become her lover.
RICHARD CRASHAW.
It is a significant fact that so few poets should even have tried to render the exaltations and agonies of physical love. But it is also significant that many who have written of divine love should, without intending it have given the most precise and intense poetic rendering of the erotic experience from which they so scrupulously averted their attention. Blake’s comments on the relation between religion and sex deserve to be better known than they seem to be. Here, in nine astonishing lines, they are.
The moment of desire! the moment of desire! the virgin
That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber: the youth shut up from
The lustful joy shall forget to generate and create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence,
The self-enjoyings of self-denial? Why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude,
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?
WILLIAM BLAKE.
Love and Oblivion
Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas,
et tædet Veneris statim peractæ.
Non ergo ut pecudes libidinosæ
cæci protinus irruamus illuc;
nam languescit amor peritque flamma;
sed sic sic sine fine feriati
et tecum jaceamus osculantes.
Hic nullus labor est ruborque nullus:
hoc juvit, juvat et diu juvabit;
hoc non deficit, incipitque semper.
PETRONIUS ARBITER.
English Version
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it;
Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it:
For lust will languish, and that heat decay.
But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,
Let us together closely lie and kiss,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.
BEN JONSON.
Le soleil, sur le sable, ô lutteuse endormie,
En l’or de tes cheveux chauffe un bain langoureux
Et, consumant l’encens sur ta joue ennemie,
Il mêle avec les pleurs un breuvage amoureux.
De ce blanc Flamboiement l’immuable accalmie
T’a fait dire, attristée, ô mes baisers peureux,
“Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie
Sous l’antique désert et les palmiers heureux!”
Mais ta chevelure est une rivière tiède,
Ou noyer sans frissons l’âme qui nous obsède
Et trouver ce Néant que tu ne connais pas.
Je goûterai le fard pleuré par tes paupières,
Pour voir s’il sait donner au coeur que tu frappas
L’insensibilité de l’azur et des pierres.
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.
Morpheus in mentem
trahit impellentem
ventum lenem
segetes maturas,
murmura rivorum
per arenas puras,
circulares ambitus
molendinorum,
qui furantur somno
lumen oculorum.
Post blanda Veneris
commercia,
lassatur cerebri
substantia.
Hinc caligantes mira novitate
oculi nantes in palpebrarum rate,
hei quam felix transitus amoris ad soporem,
sed suavior regressus soporis ad amorem!
ANON., 12TH-13TH CENT.
The Guide of our dark steps a triple veil
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps;
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.
Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labour’s dull, Lethean spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soiled glory and the trailing wing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Sed sic sic sine fine feriati—the line is one of the loveliest in all Latin poetry and contains, what is more, the most succinct and accurate account with which I am acquainted of a certain almost supernatural state of bodily and mental beatitude—the felix transitus amoris ad soporem. In describing this Nirvana as a mere Néant—a river of unconsciousness to drown the soul in—Mallarmé is making, it seems to me, a rather crude simplification. And, anyhow, are such souls
