On the Erotic in Poetry and Literature (part III) [by David Lehman]

In the English canon, I have a special affection for the seduction poems of John Donne and Andrew Marvell. Donne issued robust commands and adorned them in the most outlandish of poetic conceits. The female body becomes the map of the world: “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below. / O my America! my new-found-land.” Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a monument to Latin logic (we’re young, time’s flying, act now) and features the sort of naughty pun that has delighted generations of English majors. Having praised his lady hyperbolically in the poem’s first stanza, Marvell heartlessly threatens her in the next with an image of untimely death: “then worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity, / And your quaint honor turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust.” The pun on “quaint” – from the medieval queinte, the word from which “cunt” derives – enhances a poem that epitomizes seventeenth-century metaphysical wit. You’re meant to hear an echo of “The Miller’s Tale,” the bawdiest of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a cunning clerk catches a lithesome lass “by the queinte.” Chaucer is writing a ribald and bawdy narrative, Marvell a seduction poem with a carpe diem argument. The two works couldn’t differ more dramatically. Yet I would not hesitate to characterize each as erotic, as is, for that matter, the Song of Songs in the Old Testament: “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one bead of thy necklace. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all spices!”

In the realm of the erotic, the sacred and the profane converge, and so do the sublime and the ridiculous. The overlapping of sexual and religious impulses in art and literature is too marked to go unnoticed. Take, for example, Donne’s “holy sonnet” beginning “Batter my heart, three-personed God.” The poet presents his relation to God as that of a submissive lover begging to be overmastered. He concludes with rapid-fire paradoxes and pleas: “Take me to You, imprison me, for I, / Except You enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.” In some of Emily Dickinson’s poems as in the Donne sonnet, the sexual imagery serves a religious intent, yet the reader suspects that if you flip the terms “sexual” and “religious” in that clause, it would work equally well. The erotically obsessed Graham Greene, a sincere Catholic and unreformed adulterer, has a remarkable novel, The End of the Affair, in which the hero loses his lover not to her husband but to a much more formidable adversary -- the divinity whom she worships devoutly in church. It’s as if to say that Augustine (as he implies in his Confessions) could as easily have been a sinner as a saint, and with equal passion. For sex is as ancient a ritual, as formidable an imperative, and as elemental an instinct as the impulse to worship and to pray.

Nin Andrews remembers the first time she heard of Eros. Nin was in first grade, and her mother would read aloud to her at night, alternating Bible stories and Greek myths. “One night Mom read of Hades kidnapping Persephone,” she recalls. “Another night King David saw Bathsheba bathing. `Why are these men so bad?’ I asked. My mother's answer: `It's when they're bad that the story is good, isn't it?’” Yes, bad behavior is almost always more erotic than good. “Christianity,” according to the French novelist Anatole France, “has done a great deal for love by making a sin out of it.” The transgressive nature of much sexual behavior acts more often as an inducement than as a deterrent, and though some very good poems about lawful wedded bliss do get written, an atmosphere of sinfulness and secrecy, of clandestine assignations and furtive infidelities, permeates much of the best erotic writing. In Greene’s novels, for example, espionage is either an excuse for sexual adventure or a metaphor for it, danger fused with thrill. The id is a rebel angel. Though God instructs Adam to “be fruitful and multiply” -- it is the first commandment in Genesis – the sexual means to this end are associated with disobedience. The act of linking their bodies is what Adam and Eve do to consummate their original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge, and “carnal knowledge” is a beautiful euphemism for copulation considered as a way of passing forbidden knowledge between bodies. And after Adam and Eve have sex and sleep it off, they wake to the consciousness of guilt and the end of public nudity. 

[from The Best American Erotic Poems, ed  David Lehman (Scribner, 2008), the volume praised by the half-wit reviewer who loved "The Platonic Blow" but doubted that any heterosexual male can write a good erotic poem]

Comments

[Jacqueline L.]

Except for a passing mention of Emily Dickinson, this essay is not about "the erotic" in the broadest sense but masculine eroticism and female passivity or victimization. At a time when millions of women have finally found the courage to speak up about having been sexually assaulted and harassed, everywhere from their own family homes to their workplaces, reviving the praise of uncontrollable priapism is particularly misplaced. Okay, repression breeds transgression, that's the Catholic take on an old story. Among modern women whose well-known erotic writing grew out of that soil are Anais Nin and Susie Bright, neither mentioned here (is that because they wrote mostly prose?). But there are others whose poetry reflects agency, not submission or victimization --erotic, not pornographic. Haven't you ever read Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker?

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Jacqueline.