Let me show you a poem that I think combines Eros and the Erotic. It’s by Maurice Manning and it’s from his first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale, 2001). You’ll probably find it pretty tame.
PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE
They kicked him out
for a long list of terrible reasons:
his ways had grown old and mighty odd,
his heart had grown dangerously sick with God,
and they claimed his Ole Dreadful Daddy was a skunk.
Of course, there were other, more minor crimes, which,
nonetheless, had very serious implications. For example,
he stopped saying the word me,
he refused to watch TV,
and he had the cold audacity
to believe his generation was lost by its own accord.
Consequently, they confined him to the thirty-seven acres
and told him his punishment was work
of the lifelong, back-breaking variety;
and The Church of the Socially Concerned and Aware
sent out the Missionary Woman to comfort him with prayer.
They thought he deserved a life of toil and woe, but to tell the truth,
hard labor and banishment had been kind to Booth.
He does not mind the work or the sweat on his brow
or possessing only beehives and a one-eyed cow.
And the Missionary Woman, as it turns out,
has the finest legs in all of Christendom--
dear Lord, how he loves them!
How strange, his crimes should finally bring him ease;
his hearth is bright an the praying does not cease.
Most readers would most likely not conceive of this poem as having anything to do with sex. It’s about a lot more than sex, right? This kid has been sent off, punished, and now he’s got day and days on end of hard work before him. But the saving grace of the poem is the discovery of the Missionary Woman’s “legs.” They are fine enough that Boone’s “crimes . . . bring him ease” as he can view her legs (“the finest legs”) while praying ceaselessly. And “how he loves them!”
This is beauty. It is a moment of pure Eros, and it is erotic. Why? Because it’s a moment of connection and seems yet to be entirely happenstance. Yet, it’s also a beautiful occurrence that has been arrived at by means of fate.
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