Scholarship as Recreation in Aulus Gellius

 

As this essay is in part intended to acquaint readers with the Attic Nights, I include several fairly long passages from it.  Quotations from Gellius are from the translation of J. C. Rolfe in the Loeb Library edition of Attic Nights (1927), which the reader may conveniently consult online at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/gellius/home.html.   

 

     Surely the most critical adaptation of our species is our facility at manipulating symbols.  The evolution then of language enabled surely the more effective pursuit of prey but all subsequent thought, science, and culture as well.  Just as we perceive that cats relish stalking and imagine that orb-weaving spiders must take pleasure in a fine web, people enjoy practicing their most highly developed skill, sometimes simply as recreation in such verbal forms as jokes, songs, stories, and flights of conversation.  Since the Palaeolithic era people’s verbal play has constituted their primary form of entertainment.

     A taste for such semiotic dancing in both composer and consumer is the initial motive for all literature.  In certain written works, however, the human fondness for symbolic play is more highlighted, more naked, more joyously enthusiastic.  In journals, notebooks, and commonplace books, the jottings and sketchings of the mind may rarely rise to the level of the sublime, but they directly indicate our human pleasure in symbolic play, creating, carving, juggling, forming ever-new patterns in the immense catalogue of possibilities generated by grammar.  Among the greatest of such works are surely The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, and the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) of Aulus Gellius.

     I have lately been reading in Aulus Gellius.  It is not a volume to read through one page after another, beginning to end.  I am opening the Loeb Library volumes at random and reading ten or twelve pages at a stretch.  The work invites that sort of approach.  It is a miscellany, an omnium gatherum, a rag-bag, and the author readily admits that the book lacks structure; its construction follows no discernable order but the wanderings of a human mind, all digressions and no central path.  The very title seems to hint at something torrid and tropical, warm zephyrs playing over a bare torso under loose robes, a cool glass of retsina at hand, and the book does indeed pursue a sort of hedonism.  For the author, though, some of the greatest pleasures are intellectual, undiminished in intensity by the fact that the fox his mind was hunting may bd either grand, such as the question of whether the phenomenal world be real, or minute, such as an obscure linguistic detail or an odd shred of natural history.  The primary association of the title for a Roman would have been its invocation of the revered Greek rhetorical and poetic traditions, inviting the reader for a bit of play in the realm of the recondite.

     The book is a collection of short comments and narrations, a paragraph or two or three on every sort of topic, but frequently concerning language or history.  As a result of this form Gellius is less often read for his style or for the impact of the book as a whole than remembered for the many fragments of lost writings he preserves which scholars may mine for historic and linguistic details.  Considered in itself the Attic Nights is a charming example of cognition as recreation, intellectual riffing as play.  The book’s unstructured form, its interest in oddities and details invites the reader to turn a curious imaginative gaze as the author points out the dramatic trees, pretty scenes, and unlikely hillocks of a great variety of scenes, whether encountered in lived experience or in books.  Gellius’ aesthetic intention is unmistakable.  He explicitly defines his aim as to be “entertaining,” that “recreation might be provided for my children, when they should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds.”  He describes his method as “haphazard,” “without order or arrangement,” “off-hand, without premeditation” (Praefatio).  Such randomness is appropriate since the free process of ratiocination and the play of imagination are the goal more than any apodictic conclusion.

     Gellius displays his rhetorical sophistication even as he disclaims it, deploying the humility topos as he claims to write “almost in rustic fashion.”  While “bearing in mind my limitations,” he says he falls as far “short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style.”  Yet he goes on to define an ambitious goal, promising his book might be “a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts,” offering “the germs and the quality to make men's minds grow more vigorous, their memory more trustworthy, their eloquence more effective, their diction purer, or the pleasures of their hours of leisure and recreation more refined.”  For Gellius verbal facility is a source of pleasure as well as the chief means of cultivating the mind and, most importantly, the fountainhead of all intellectual work. 

     He goes so far as to warn off potential readers who do not delight in language, those “who have never found pleasure nor busied themselves in reading, inquiring, writing and taking notes, who have never spent wakeful nights in such employments, who have never improved themselves by discussion and debate with rival followers of the same Muse.”  Such people prefer to waste their time, he suggests, “in the turmoil of business affairs.”  Without criticizing earning a living, Gellius suggests that people do not become fully human until their time is their own. 

     A passage in Attic Nights (III, 1) provides a nearly cinematic enactment of what he is talking about.

 

     When winter was already waning, we were walking with the philosopher Favorinus in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun; and there, as we walked, Sallust's Catiline was being read, a book which Favorinus had seen in the hands of a friend and had asked him to read.  The following passage from that book had been recited: "Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate; it is ever unbounded, nor can either plenty or want make it less."  Then Favorinus looked at me and said: "How does avarice make a man's body effeminate? For I seem to grasp in general the meaning of his statement that it has that effect on a manly soul, but how also it makes his body effeminate I do not yet comprehend."  "I too," said I, "have for a long time been putting myself that question, and if you had not anticipated me, I should of my own accord have asked you to answer it."

     Scarcely had I said this with some hesitation, when one of the disciples of Favorinus, who seemed to be an old hand in the study of literature, broke in: "I once heard Valerius Probus say that Sallust here used a kind of poetic circumlocution, and meaning to say that a man was corrupted by avarice, spoke of his body and soul, the two factors which indicate a man; for man is made up of body and soul."  "Never," replied Favorinus, "at least, so far as I know, was our Probus guilty of such impertinent and bold subtlety as to say that Sallust, a most skilful artist in conciseness, used poetic paraphrases."

     There was with us at the time in the same promenade a man of considerable learning.  He too, on being asked by Favorinus whether he had anything to say on the subject, answered to this effect: "We observe that almost all those whose minds are possessed and corrupted by avarice and who have devoted themselves to the acquisition of money from any and every source, so regulate their lives, that compared with money they neglect manly toil and attention to bodily exercise, as they do everything else.  For they are commonly intent upon indoor and sedentary pursuits, in which all their vigoor of mind and body is enfeebled and, as Sallust says, ‘rendered effeminate.'”

     Then Favorinus again asked to have the same words of Sallust read again, and when they had been read, he said: "How then are we to explain the fact, that it is possible to find many men who are greedy for money, but nevertheless have strong and active bodies?"  To this the man replied thus: "Your answer is certainly to the point. Whoever," said he, "is greedy for money, but nevertheless has a body that is strong and in good condition, must necessarily be possessed either by an interest in, or devotion to, other things as well, and cannot be equally niggardly in his care of himself.  For if extreme avarice, to the exclusion of everything else, lay hold upon all a man's actions and desires, and if it extend even to neglect of his body, so that because of that one passion he has regard neither for virtue nor physical strength, nor body, nor soul — then, and then only, can that vice truly be said to cause effeminacy both of body and soul, since such men care neither for themselves nor for anything else except money."  Then said Favorinus: "Either what you have said is reasonable, or Sallust, through hatred of avarice, brought against it a heavier charge than he could justify."

 

     As the anecdote opens, a group of friends appears at leisure, enjoying a stroll as the last days of winter give way to early spring “in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun.”  Among the party is the philosopher Favorinus, an Academic Skeptic and Gellius’ teacher.  One of the party carries a copy of Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline and reads aloud as they walk.  The modern reader is struck by the depiction of a culture in which a promenade might be accompanied by reading aloud, and abstract questions are discussed for the sheer joy of debate more than in the interest of problem solving or academic rivalry.  Thinkers naturally lead the group, here the center is Favorinus, advocate of a strict skepticism and, incidentally, described as a born eunuch, yet celebrated for his philosophic powers.  Favorinus became sufficiently controversial not because of his ambiguous sexuality but due to Hadrian’s arbitrary disfavor that Corinth tore down the statue the city had erected in his honor, causing him to remark drily that it was a pity that had Socrates had such statue to serve as his proxy, he might have been saved from execution.

     Here, however, Favorinus is simply moderator of a discussion to which all present are welcome to contribute.  The coterie is preselected; one participant is identified as “a man of considerable learning” and another as “an old hand in the study of literature,” giving their remarks depth and weight, and instructing the less experienced by their tone and manner more than by their opinions.  A modern American reader is likely to be struck by the issue they consider: whether avarice saps one’s strength, rendering a person effeminate.  This idea recalls the preface’s contemptuous dismissal of those who devote themselves to “business affairs,” a refreshing attitude to those of us who inhabit a culture in which making money is considered the hallmark of manly vigor. 

     For this party of leisured ancient Romans, though, the question in the end is left open.  Sallust may or may not be correct or he may be correct in part; he may have expressed himself accurately or perhaps in a misleading, “over-artful” fashion.  There is no certainty, only inquiry, the Greek meaning, in fact, of the word skepticism.  These Romans revel in practicing cognition, in juggling ideas, and in the social contact with other thinking beings capable of the same amusement, Plato’s clique freed from great ideas and allowed the smallest of small talk for the simple fun of it, just passing the time on a warming afternoon.

     Though Gellius’ entries are more often presented as third-hand accounts of opinions than in dialogue dramas like this, in each the author carries on a colloquy with acquaintances, writers of the past, and inevitably with the presumed reader.  Gellius interests himself, it seems, equally in every topic.  He discusses the smallest details of language and usage or of history with the same absorbed interest that he accords major issues of epistemology.  Always animated by the spirit of disinterested inquiry, pure self-justifying research, ludic thought, the weight of each section of text is equal to any other.  A review of a few passages, chosen as randomly as my desultory reading of Attic Nights, illustrates the author’s sensibility.

          This Favorinus who asked that Sallust be read aloud was an Academic Skeptic in the tradition of Arcesilaus.  At one point in the Attic Nights Gellius defines their position.

 

Those whom we call the Pyrronian philosophers are designated by the Greek name σκεπτικοί, or "sceptics," which means about the same as "inquirers" and "investigators."  For they decide nothing and determine nothing, but are always engaged in inquiring and considering what there is in all nature concerning which it is possible to decide and determine.  And moreover they believe that they do not see or hear anything clearly, but that they undergo and experience something like seeing and hearing; but they are in doubt as of that nature and character of those very things which cause them those experiences, and they deliberate about them; and they declare that in everything assurance and absolute truth seem so beyond our grasp, owing to the mingling and confusing of the indications of truth and falsehood, that any man who is not rash and precipitate in his judgment ought to use the language which they say was used by Pyrro, the founder of that philosophy: "Does not this matter stand so, rather than so, or is it neither?" For they deny that proofs of anything and its real qualities can be known and understood, and they try in many ways to point this out and demonstrate it.   On this subject Favorinus too with great keenness and subtlety has composed ten books, which he entitled Πυρρωνεῖοι Τρόποι, or The Pyrronian Principles.                                  (XI, 5)

 

     The following section of this entry goes on to emphasize the absolute skepticism of the Pyrrhonians who in contrast to the Academic Skeptics question even the certainty of uncertainty.  The schools are so similar that he says they are often confused.  Both base their inquiries into the meaning of appearances (φαντασίαι) which both Pyrrhonians and Academics regard as reflecting not “the nature of the objects themselves,” but rather “the condition of mind or body of those to whom these appearances come.”  These data are unreliable since they consider “all things that affect men's sense” to be “τὰ πρός τι,” that is, "things relative to something else," a notion resembling the Buddhist “pratītyasamutpāda,” or dependent origination.  For this reason everything possesses only a qualified and ambiguous reality.

     Accepting that nothing can be finally verified might seem to disable research before it begins, but the skeptic is an inquirer.  The denial of a dogmatic conclusion need not halt the process of seeking truth.  The assumption of the tight web of causality apparently linking every element in what seems the phenomenal world endows every bit of information with a gleam as numinous as the next bit.  A sensibility like that reflected in this book will look with interest on any information at all, but, as a homo sapiens, with a particular fancy for the play of signification in language.  The meaning may hold secondary importance of none at all.  Gellius can manipulate abstractions based on observation like a painter imagining the design of a picture while observing decorative fountains.  He elevates what might be an idle fondness for trivia into a philosophic enterprise by celebrating the pure play of thought.  Though Gellius exhibits no piety as such, his relish for every detail illuminates his inquiry like an interior lit by stained glass windows; his book is a lengthy series of tiny side chapels in the cranium.

     Modern readers who are not specialists in historical philology may have little sympathy for the appeal of a topic like the question of “Whether affatim, like admodum, should be pronounced with an acute accent on the first syllable; with some painstaking observations on the accents of other words.” (VI, 7)  In Gellius’ circles, however, such minutiae engaged many.  He records, for instance, that when he wrote a friend, noting that he had written twice before, making this the third time (tertium), his correspondent raises an issue of usage, asking why he had written tertium and not tertio and going on to inquire whether “one should say tertium consul, meaning "consul for the third time," and quartum, or tertio and quarto.” (X, 1)  Is the author a tiresome pedant or a crusader for precise language?  I suggest he is neither as much as he is simply a denizen of a semiotic realm, enjoying his environment, swimming in an ocean of words as the shark glides through the sea, in his case by making conversation with a friend.  The topic of their talk is of little moment.

     Even the most sympathetic reader would concede that a good deal of Gellius’ book consists of matter that looks rather like abstruse nit-picking.  At times the Attic Nights seems a monument of pedantic minutiae like those grand tomes of Chandler on accents or Denniston on Greek particles with the difference that Gellius’ work has less practical use.  While those works were composed to aid the reader of Classical texts, only by unlikely coincidence might a topic Gellius addresses be useful in reading a text or solving a problem.  The only excuse for reading Gellius is to pass the time pleasantly, but any human end higher than this must rest on shaky ground. 

     Gellius’ imagination possesses not only a microscope to examine with detail and precision the niceties of language; he had as well a telescope capable of a focus far beyond the horizon.  His grand topics enter through the same intimate social context he uses for what seem more trivial issues.  His approach to basic issues of semiotics and epistemology goes far to account for his sensibility and the character of the book that preserves, as though in amber, indications of his consciousness.

 

     Chrysippus asserts that every word is by nature ambiguous, since two or more things may be understood from the same word. But Diodorus, surnamed Cronus, says: "No word is ambiguous, and no one speaks or receives a word in two senses; and it ought not to seem to be said in any other sense than that which the speaker feels that he is giving it. But when I," said he, "meant one thing and you have understood another, it may seem that I have spoken obscurely rather than ambiguously; for the nature of an ambiguous word should be such that he who speaks it expresses two or more meanings. But no man expresses two meanings who has felt that he is expressing but one."                            (XI, 12)

 

     The Stoic Chrysippus, (who may have been acting the provocateur) argues that all utterance is ambiguous and indeterminate in meaning.  He here approaches the position of Gorgias and, a few generations later, Pyrrho that communication is impossible.   His interlocutor objects that every speaker has a meaning in mind which must then be considered the single correct meaning.  Such meaning is unchanged even if one’s audience misunderstands.  As always, Gellius simply presents both sides of a question (just as Diogenes Laertius [VII, 7, 183] says that Chrysippus would do), and Diodorus’ confidence is unpersuasive since intentions may be far from clear even to the individual, and language that may sometimes convey signification accurately is little better than language that always fails.  For Gellius there is always more to talk about tomorrow.  

     His anecdote of the Greek Cynic Peregrinus Proteus introduces a character more intriguing perhaps than his teaching. 

 

     When I was at Athens, I met a philosopher named Peregrinus, who was later surnamed Proteus, a man of dignity and fortitude, living in a hut outside the city. And visiting him frequently, I heard him say many things that were in truth helpful and noble. Among these I particularly recall the following:

     He used to say that a wise man would not commit a sin, even if he knew that neither gods nor men would know it; for he thought that one ought to refrain from sin, not through fear of punishment or disgrace, but from love of justice and honesty and from a sense of duty.  If, however, there were any who were neither so endowed by nature nor so well disciplined that they could easily keep themselves from sinning by their own will power, he thought that such men would all be more inclined to sin whenever they thought that their guilt could be concealed and when they had hope of impunity because of such concealment.  "But," said he, "if men know that nothing at all can be hidden for very long, they will sin more reluctantly and more secretly."  Therefore he said that one should have on his lips these verses of Sophocles, the wisest of poets:

See to it lest you try aught to conceal;

Time sees and hears all, and will all reveal.

     Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

 

    In the opening of the story, the reader glimpses once more the social context for Gellius’ sensibility.  He and others knew Peregrinus personally, a man not only with opinions, but with a distinct lifestyle as well, living in a “hut” outside of town in imitation of Diogenes to indicate his contempt for worldly values.  Peregrinus had, like Augustine, passed through phases in his spirituality, having for some years practiced Christianity in Palestine.  In the end he announced his intention to commit suicide go demonstrate his indifference to death and carried out this intention during the Olympics when crowds might appreciate his gesture.  Lucian who witnessed the event described his motive.

 

He said that he wanted to put a tip of gold on a golden life; for one who had lived as Heracles should die like Heracles and be commingled with the aether. And I wish, said he, to benefit mankind by showing them the way in which one should disregard death.                                                             (De Morte Peregrini, 33)

 

In Gellius’ story, the philosopher himself cites a line from a tragedian as support for his ideas and this line reminds Gellius of another passage which he cites, though unsure of its author.  The fact that the source of his phrase has slipped his mind only emphasizes the casual quotidian character of his inquiries.  They are like his breathing a matter of daily experience. 

     Many of Gellius’ anecdotes reflect the social world of his day, in which it seems everyone (among the elite) was a verbal artist and everyone a philosopher.  One story relates how a student risked death in order to hear Socrates speak, in contrast to the dissipated youth of the present generation.

 

The philosopher Taurus, a celebrated Platonist of my time, used to urge the study of philosophy by many other good and wholesome examples and in particular stimulated the minds of the young by what he said that Euclides the Socratic used to do.  "The Athenians," said he, "had provided in one of their decrees that any citizen of Megara who should be found to have set foot in Athens should for that suffer death; so great," says he, "was the hatred of the neighbouring men of Megara with which the Athenians were inflamed.  Then Euclides, who was from that very town of Megara and before the passage of that decree had been accustomed to come to Athens and to listen to Socrates, after the enactment of that measure, at nightfall, as darkness was coming on, clad in a woman's long tunic, wrapped in a parti-coloured mantle, and with veiled head, used to walk from his home in Megara to Athens, to visit Socrates, in order that he might at least for some part of the night share in the master's teaching and discourse. And just before dawn he went back again, a distance of somewhat over twenty miles, disguised in that same garb.  But nowadays," said Taurus, "we may see the philosophers themselves running to the doors of rich young men, to give them instruction, and there they sit and wait until nearly noonday, for their pupils to sleep off all last night's wine."                          (VII 10)

 

Taurus had been, in fact, Gellius’ own teacher, so this note likely records an actual lecture.  Euclides of Megara went on to write dialogues and commentaries himself (though very little remains) maintaining a monistic view still based on his master’s teachings, a kind of revival of Parmenides’ non-dualistic thought.  According to Diogenes Laertius (II, 6, 106) “he held the supreme good to be really one, though called by many names, sometimes wisdom, sometimes God, and again Mind, and so forth. But all that is contradictory of the good he used to reject, declaring that it had no existence.”  Apart from this simple yet radical view Euclides was receptive to rhetoric and eristics, attracting criticism from Socrates himself who preferred the pose of a disinterested pursuit of truth.

     Gellius would have stood with Euclides in his extravagant use of regardless of truth-claims.  Specific teachings are hardly an issue in Attic Nights.  Whatever the theme or the conclusion, what is important here is the process, the social dialectics, people tossing ideas about in public and at dinner parties, recreational discussion, playful inquiry, and artful use of words, people acting people-like.   

     The taste for linguistic discernment and verbal play evident in Gellius animates as well the world of Petronius’ Satyricon, for instance, which antedated Attic Nights by about a hundred years.  The characters depicted by the arbiter elegantiae play with words as often as they play with each other’s bodies.  They debate the merits of teachers of rhetoric, spout poetry to make a point, play word games, refer to Homer, and discuss issues of no immediate relevance.  Today, a not dissimilar taste is evident in contemporary bumper stickers, graffiti, advertising slogans, and internet memes as well as in popular music and drama.  The character of some of the earliest human burials indicates that this taste for the symbolic has existed since prehistoric times.

     Wherever the reader opens the Attic Nights, there is Gellius exercising his gratuitous ingenuity, a kind of joyously superfluous symbolic manipulation, semiotic fooling for its own sake, toward no end whatever but the celebration of our oh-so-human minds.  And the reader may perform the part of silent dance partner, relishing the grace notes, the subtleties, the fine texture of another’s consciousness as though it were an abstract pattern.  Here is the very fountainhead of art, science, and philosophy.  Arguments about the origin of language may be always unresolved, but perhaps our species began communicating simply because it was so much fun.  If the hunters bagged more game that way, they also afforded themselves greater leisure to talk away the long evenings of their days.  And Gellius was doing much the same in antiquity as I do now, reading Gellius on my computer screen as he read from  manuscripts, and you the reader have joined as well, an equal partner in the endless conversation.

Four Political Poems by Heinrich Heine

 

My translations are followed by the German originals. 

 

     Heinrich Heine’s collection Neue Gedichte (1844) contains a section titled “Zeitgedichte” which may be translated “poems of the times,” or “topical poems.”  Many of these had appeared in the radical German journal Vorwärts! which had been established in Paris by the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer to avoid censorship in German-speaking lands.  Karl Marx had contributed from its start and, in the latter part of the publication’s scant year of existence, and, after the folding of his Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, Marx assumed editorial duties before Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia convinced Louis Philippe to suppress it.  The poet remained a friend and comrade of Marx in spite of differences in temperament and ideology.  Shortly after Vorwärts! was forced to close, when Marx was expelled from France, he sent Heine a note saying “Of all the people I am leaving behind here, those I leave with most regret are the Heines.  I would gladly include you in my luggage!”

    The fact that the modern ear has become so accustomed to more-or-less free verse creates a significant obstacle to the translation of much earlier poetry.  Chinese poetry, for instance, is most commonly brought into English with little regard for the sound forms of the original.  Those who can enjoy the originals are rarely capable of transferring the musicality of Troubadour poetry.   Not only is it a chore to devise equivalent rhymes, even when smooth, the result often reminds readers of nursery rhymes and advertising jingles rather than artful verse.  I have done what I could to model my prosody on Heine’s (with a little slippage here and there) rather than to make him seem modern in ways in which he was not.  He had, after all, for all his irony, self-consciousness, and cynicism, one foot in Romanticism. 

  

Adam the First

 

You sent forth with a flaming sword

A gendarme out of God’s abode

And ran me out of Paradise.

You neither right nor pity showed.

 

I exited with my dear wife

To find another place to stay,

But that I’d eaten wisdom’s fruit

You cannot take away.

 

You cannot change what I know now,

Your pettiness, your futile forms.

You try to make yourself so big

And frighten us through death and storms.

 

Oh, God, how pitiful it is,

Consilium abeundi!

Must I call that Magnificus,

Oh God, and you the lumen mundi?

 

I know that I will never miss

Your all-so-perfect land!

How can it be a paradise

Where tabooed trees do stand?

 

I want my total freedom now!

The very smallest limitation

Turns what could be Paradise

To hell and persecution.

 

 

Secret

 

We hardly sigh, our eyes are dry

We sometimes laugh, we smile a lot!

We give no sign, no little clue

Of that great secret that we’ve got

 

With silent pain it cultivates

Our soul’s most bloody ground.

It screams out in the wild wild heart,

But from the lips no sound.

 

Ask the infant in her cradle,

Ask the dead man buried there –

It may be they can tell to you

The secret that I would not share.

 

 

Doctrine

By Heinrich Heine

 

Hey!  Beat the drum and have no fear!

Kiss market girls without offense!

For this is all we know of truth

And this is all books’ deepest sense.

 

Drum every sleeper from his bed,

Drum reveille with youthful power

March forward, forward to the drum,

That’s all you need to know this hour. 

 

That’s the heart of Hegel’s thought,

The deepest sense of books, no doubt!

I understand because I’m smart

And since I beat the drum so loud.

 

 

The Emperor of China

 

My father was a dry old oaf,

A sober-minded thing,

But I drink hearty, lots of schnapps,

And I’m a great, great king!

 

I’ve found it is a magic drink.

Prepared at my command.

When I have drunk down all my schnapps,

Blood drenches my whole land!

 

The Middle Kingdom changes then

To fields of flowers wild,

And I myself almost a man,

My wife may get a child.

 

Everywhere there’s plenty now,

The ill folks feeling fine!

Confucius, court philosopher,

whose thoughts with reason shine!

 

The soldiers’ pumpernickel bread

Transforms to almond bread!

And all the bums in all the towns

In velvet promenade.

 

The big shots of the ruling class,

May have deluded brains,

But they regain their youthful strength

And toss their coiffured manes.

 

The great pagoda, sign and fortress strong

Of faith, we now can share.

The last Jews will soon be baptized

And get fine medals there.

 

 

All the Manchu fat cats shout,

as revolution wanes,

“We want no constitution now,

We use just whips and canes!”

 

Asclepius the wise advised

Us not to drink.  I take

And drink my schnapps and drink some more,

For love of country’s sake.

 

I’ll take a schnapps, and then a schnapps,

It tastes like heaven’s manna!

I’ll give the people just the crap

And hear them cheer “Hosanna!”

 

 

Adam der Erste 

 

Du schicktest mit dem Flammenschwert

Den himmlischen Gendarmen,

Und jagtest mich aus dem Paradies,

Ganz ohne Recht und Erbarmen!

 

Ich ziehe fort mit meiner Frau

Nach andren Erdenländern;

Doch daß ich genossen des Wissens Frucht,

Das kannst du nicht mehr ändern.

 

Du kannst nicht ändern, daß ich weiß,

Wie sehr du klein und nichtig,

Und machst du dich auch noch so sehr

Durch Tod und Donnern wichtig.

 

O Gott! wie erbärmlich ist doch dies

Consilium abeundi!

Das nenne ich einen Magnifikus

Der Welt, ein lumen mundi!

 

Vermissen werde ich nimmermehr

Die paradiesischen Räume;

Das war kein wahres Paradies

Es gab dort verbotene Bäume.

 

Ich will mein volles Freiheitsrecht!

Find ich die g'ringste Beschränknis,

Verwandelt sich mir das Paradies

In Hölle und Gefängnis.

 

 

Geheimnis

 

Wir seufzen nicht, das Aug' ist trocken,

Wir lächeln oft, wir lachen gar!

In keinem Blick, in keiner Miene,

Wird das Geheimnis offenbar.

 

Mit seinen stummen Qualen hegt es

In unsrer Seele blut'gem Grund;

Wird es auch laut im wilden Herzen,

Krampfhaft verschlossen bleibt der Mund.

 

Frag du den Säugling in der Wiege

Frag du die Toten in dem Grab,

Vielleicht daß diese dir entdecken,

Was ich dir stets verschwiegen hab.

 

 

Doktrin

 

Schlage die Trommel und fürchte dich nicht,

und küsse die Marketenderin!

Das ist die ganze Wissenschaft,

das ist der Bücher tiefster Sinn.

 

Trommle die Leute aus dem Schlaf,

trommle Reveille mit Jugendkraft,

marschiere trommelnd immer voran,

das ist die ganze Wissenschaft.

 

Das ist die Hegelsche Philosophie,

das ist der Bücher tiefster Sinn!

Ich habe sie begriffen, weil ich gescheit,

und weil ich ein guter Tambour bin.

 

 

Der Kaiser von China.

 

Mein Vater war ein trockner Taps,

Ein nüchterner Duckmäuser,

Ich aber trinke meinen Schnaps

Und bin ein großer Kaiser.

 

Das ist ein Zaubertrank! Ich hab’s

Entdeckt in meinem Gemüthe:

Sobald ich getrunken meinen Schnaps

Steht China ganz in Blüthe.

 

Das Reich der Mitte verwandelt sich dann

In einen Blumenanger,

Ich selber werde fast ein Mann

Und meine Frau wird schwanger.

 

All überall ist Ueberfluß

Und es gesunden die Kranken;

Mein Hofweltweiser Confusius

Bekömmt die klarsten Gedanken.

 

Der Pumpernickel des Soldats

Wird Mandelkuchen – O Freude!

Und alle Lumpen meines Staats

Spazieren in Sammt und Seide.

 

Die Mandarinenritterschaft,

Die invaliden Köpfe,

Gewinnen wieder Jugendkraft

Und schütteln ihre Zöpfe.

 

Die große Pagode, Symbol und Hort

Des Glaubens, ist fertig geworden;

Die letzten Juden taufen sich dort

Und kriegen den Drachen-Orden.

 

Es schwindet der Geist der Revolution

Und es rufen die edelsten Mantschu:

Wir wollen keine Constitution,

Wir wollen den Stock, den Kantschu!

 

Wohl haben die Schüler Eskulaps

Das Trinken mir widerrathen,

Ich aber trinke meinen Schnaps

Zum Besten meiner Staaten.

 

Und noch einen Schnaps, und noch einen Schnaps!

Das schmeckt wie lauter Manna!

Mein Volk ist glücklich, hat’s auch den Raps

Und jubelt: Hoseanna!

Confronting Impotence in Seventeenth Century Verse

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the poems, those in brackets to endnotes.  The poems by Rochester, Behn, and Etherege follow the essay in the order in which they are discussed.

 

      A significant portion of lyric poetry concerns love, and the greater part focuses on the pains of love-longing.  Few poems celebrate the joys of married life.  Yet pitfalls exist for the lover apart from a stand-offish beloved.  Male impotence, though it seems very nearly a human obsession to judge from the array of nostrums (as well as legitimate medical interventions) that claim to treat it, is rarely the subject of poetry.  Indeed, what the advertisements today call E. D. has been considered such a source of shame that the very subject is often tabooed.

     In poetry, of course, language mediates the gap between the reader and experience, and there only rhetoric can ameliorate the world’s woes.  Restoration poets in England, often following the lead of France, devised a variety of strategies to confront sexual failure with language in a series of witty psychologically and socially revealing “imperfect enjoyment” poems [1].  In literary terms, these works represent yet another case of the transformation of convention, illustrating the generative possibilities of literary convention.  While maintaining the same narrative and sharing significant elements of tradition, each seventeenth century poet used rhetoric to develop a distinct tone accompanying significantly different thematic implications.

     In the Ovidian model for these impotence poems [2] the persona, while boasting of past sexual performances, finds himself at a loss.  He considers whether he might be the victim of magical spells [3], a likelihood the lady endorses, though she suggests the real reason may be his having just had sex with someone else.  The poem ends with her poised exit, comely yet as she exits, having given up and bid farewell to the would-be lover.  In spite of her sprightly dismissal of her partner, the reader may infer a certain male defensiveness in the posited causes for his failure.  Neither a magic spell nor sexual exhaustion impugn a man’s identity as simple impotence might, and the poem maintains a tone of sophisticated play in spite of the man’s chagrin.  In the end the woman’s unnecessary washing indicates an agreement to keep the evening’s disappointment to themselves.  As worldly lovers, they have experienced such a scene before.

     The seventeenth century writers who composed what have come to be employ several different strategies to displace the distress caused by impotence.  In the most well-known of these, the Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” the most significant innovation is to describe the basic difficulty as a case of ejaculation praecox rather than impotentia coeundi.  Thus the problem may be ascribed in part to an excess rather than a lack of erotic excitement.  This crisis occurs in line fifteen of a seventy-two line poem, allowing the author to spend his remaining rhetoric on denouncing his unfaithful member, which he had mock-heroically praised as an “all-dissolving thunderbolt.” (10)  Though he had earlier, with neo-Platonic language, expected his genitals to “convey my soul up to her heart,” (13) (an inversion of the courtly concept of love entering at the eyes), the lover’s sexual enthusiasm outlives his erection which has become a “dead cinder” (33), a “withered flower.” (45)  Having fallen from Jovian lightning-dispensing power, his penis is now “a rakehell villain who shrinks and hides his head” (57), a “base recreant” (61), finally to appear entirely objectified, passive, and disagreeable, “a common fucking-post” (63) for porcine whores to rub against. 

     Rochester’s poem concludes with a grandly extravagant seven-line curse, a comic display in which he calls down venereal disease upon his penis, condemning it never again even to piss.  This malediction is animated by the speaker’s libertinism, apparently undiminished even if he cannot personally participate.  This motive, a kind of disembodied erotic enthusiasm, blends with the blustering tone of an embarrassed sexual failure to construct a sublimely comic picture of sexual ambition and the ridiculous self-denunciation which at once foregrounds and covers his actual lack of satisfactory performance.  The poem may be read as a satiric portrait of both the intensity of sexual desire and the ludicrous male reaction to an encounter that becomes an embarrassing debacle.

     Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” resembles Rochester’s in theme and in the implication of premature ejaculation.  The lovers’ disappointment is attributed to an “Excess of Love” (88); he has been “or'e ravish'd” (69), betrayed by “Pleasure, which too much Love destroys” (75).

 

       . . . the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.

                                        (138-140)

 

     The tone, however, dramatically differs from Rochester.  In literary terms, in spite of the reference to a “Shepherdess” (138), Rochester observes no pastoral conventions, presenting his couple more or less realistically.  Behn’s use of pastoral names for her couple invokes a tradition in which love songs and songs of love-longing are common, a tradition which makes ample allowance for satire as well.  Her conclusion is a scene from Poussin with nymphs, Daphne, Apollo, and Venus added to the use of “Shepherdess.”  In this pretty confection the flurry of references provides ironic distance from the bed, and vituperation, so significant in Rochester’s poem, plays little role in Behn’s.

     A more radical deviation, doubtless the aspect attracting the most comment in recent years, is the greater complexity of the woman’s psychology in “The Disappointment.”  Whereas neither Ovid nor Rochester contains any indication of reluctance on the woman’s part, in Aphra Behn’s poem Cloris’ attitude is more problematical.  Though she submits because she could “defend her self no longer” (4) and she clearly declares that she might as well die as submit to his desire (29), she still “permits his force” (14) and, indeed, seeks through her actions “to draw him on” (17).  This ambivalence is consistent to the end, saying “Cease — cease” (25), yet “each touch” awakens “new Desires” (35).  On the one  hand, the lovers are belligerents and her body a besieged city, (“the Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy” [40]), yet both are “in Transports” (53).  She is a sacrificial victim (46 and 58) yet she seeks to excite him  (103) and finds his genitals like a betraying “snake,” not for their threat but due to inability to perform (110).  She feels in the end ambivalence, “Disdain and Shame” (118) both because of the woman’s place in society which prizes chastity in respectable women while valuing sexual “conquest” in men.  Some critics have thought that the lady is merely expressing conventional objections she does not feel, though it seems far more likely that both her attraction and aversion toward sex are genuine and well-justified, though contradictory.

     Another variation is added to the structural play of the transformation of convention with the playwright George Etherege’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” though the basic scenario is unchanged: the coming together, the unsuccessful love-making, and the lady’s retreat.  Her psychomachia over consent is dismissed as a becoming pose of “modesty” (3), such that she resists “with pleasing force” (2).  His persona views the woman’s actions as complex and dialectic; her eyes and her arms have different goals, but the entire pursuit is thus rendered only the more titillating, the revelation of her body becomes a lengthy tease, part of their sophisticated mutual erotic game. [4]  “To save a lily she must lose a rose” (14).  Yet, in the end, when about to initiate intercourse, in the martial imagery absent in Ovid but appearing in both Rochester and Behn, the lover finds himself “dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall” (30). 

     Rather than generating a flow of invective as in Rochester or the Classical pastoral tapestry woven by Behn, Etherege exploits the situation to create neatly balanced rhetorical formulae, often paradoxical after the manner of an Oscar Wilde play.   The effect is sparkling wit.   Virtually every line is a bipolar balance in partial self-contradiction.  In the poem’s last twelve lines I count no less than eleven such figures in a rhetorical tour de force.   

 

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

Here opposed are pleasure and love, the blush (indicating acquiescence) and the frown (suggesting resistance), finish and start, female and male, victory and loss, shame and glory, weakness and strength, presence and absence, comfort and care, happiness and beauty.  All are natural or near antonyms except the first and last, already prominent by position, which thereby receive increased attention.   The neat wit of the concluding line caps a dazzling display of conceptual manipulation in which the “pretty amorous discourse,” while disrupted in the story’s imaginative world, is so adroitly managed on the page that the potency of the poet is restored through his adept use of language.  What ends in railing for Rochester, and in something like a painted screen in Behn, seems in Etherege calculated, part of the set-up for a display of flashy one-liners.

     Rochester found enough potential for variation in the convention to write another poem titled “The Imperfect Enjoyment.”  This version is utterly different in tone from its better-known namesake.  Though the plot-line remains the same, the persona in this piece never loses equipoise.  A rhetoric of balanced periods built of bipolar oppositions presents a resolution in art and sound if not in lived experience. 

     The opening line might puzzle the modern reader: “Fruition was the question in debate.”  At issue is the value of orgasm, often taken as the measure of sexual success.  For D. H. Lawrence and for Norman Mailer in the twentieth century the pursuit of the perfect orgasm acquired immense significance.  Yet in the seventeenth century a small subgenre of poems questioned the value of coming to “fruition.”  For Henry King, for instance fruition is “the bane” that undoes love.  [5]  Rochester seeks a “middle way,” in which sexual denial only heightens pleasure and “feigned virtue” is “but a bawd to vice.” (8)  Again eliding the greater hazard for women in sexual indulgence, he treats his lover’s resistance as coyly coquettish, yet cautions that it may end poorly with “the victor’s fate” being “to die at the entrance of the op’ning gate” (37-38).  He accepts responsibility for the failure of the encounter yet, instead of angry denunciations of his private parts, he adopts a cool position of sly wit.

 

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.

                                                                       (41-2)

 

The poem concludes with a plea for, of all things, sexual mutuality and even a sort of temperance.

 

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;              

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.

        (45-48)

 

 

     Having traced an aggressive and vituperative male voice, half-wild with the very idea of sex, self-obsessed and pushed into transgressive language in Rochester, and a more elegant though also more conflicted female voice in Behn, retreating behind the pastoral stage set, the reader finds in Etherege a more poised and polished response to sexual failure, and finally, in a return to Rochester, a measured and confident compromise.  If the anxieties of sexual performance and the ambivalences of sexual relations in a patriarchal society are not resolved, they seem to dissolve in the poise and polish of these poems. 

     Through alterations in the timbre, as one might say, of the poet’s rhetoric each has dismissed the problems of male/female relations and of sexual ego in the way of art, much as a stage magician will distract the viewer with a flourish of a scarlet handkerchief.  Yet each transformation of the “imperfect enjoyment” convention implies a specific attitude and values.  The ranting anger of one poem by Rochester corresponds to irritable frustration in mood and selfishness in love, justified by what might be called faith in the importance and profundity of sexual experience.  Behn explores female ambivalence, and illustrates the politic considerations she, and not he, must bear in mind.  Then in Etherege the reader encounters the pleasure of structural play, similar to that experienced by listeners to the Goldberg Variations.  While the reader’s interest may be maintained by the subject matter of love, the poet’s aim is less to comment on that topic than to put together becoming structures of language.  The second poem by Rochester presents the theme well-digested, thoroughly processed by a progression of authors, the rhetoric tired out by use, its possibilities plumbed, though the theme is certain to return in new dress.

 

 

 

 

1.  The term was first used by Richard Quaintance in “French Sources of the Restoration ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poem,” Philological Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 2,  (Apr 1, 1963).  The French models for such poems, Quiaintance’s principal topic, is not part of the present inquiry.

 

2.  Amores 3.7 which was translated by Marlowe among others.  While Ovid is by far the most important influence, Petronius (Satyricon, 128-140) and Tibullus (I, 5) may play a role as well.

 

3.  Impotence remains a common reason to suspect witchcraft in Africa today.  The fear of “penis-snatchers” is one contemporary form of this suspicion.

 

4.  Martial provides a neat statement of the idea.  “Do you ask what sort of maid I desire or dislike, Flaccus? I dislike one too easy, and one too coy. The just mean, which lies between the two extremes, is what I approve; I like neither that which tortures, nor that which cloys.” (1,57  “To Flaccus”)

 

5.  King’s “Paradox. That Fruition Destroyes Love” says

Fruition therefore is the bane t'undoe

Both our affection and the subject too.

'Tis Love into worse language to translate,

And make it into Lust degenerate.

Suckling wrote two poems against fruition, and Aphra Behn “To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,

I filled with love, and she all over charms;

Both equally inspired with eager fire,

Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.

With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,             [5]

She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.

Her nimble tongue, Love’s lesser lightening, played

Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed

Swift orders that I should prepare to throw

The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.                              [10]

My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,

Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.

But whilst her busy hand would guide that part

Which should convey my soul up to her heart,

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,                                 [15]

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,

And from her body wipes the clammy joys,                 [20]

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er

My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?"

She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;

Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,                         [25]

To show my wished obedience vainly strive:

I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.

Eager desires confound my first intent,

Succeeding shame does more success prevent,

And rage at last confirms me impotent.                       [30]

Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return

To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,

Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more

Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.

Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,            [35]

A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.

This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,

With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;

Which nature still directed with such art

That it through every cunt reached every heart — [40]

Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade

Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:

Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made —

Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,

Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.          [45]

 

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,

False to my passion, fatal to my fame,

Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove

So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?

What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore            [50]

Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?

When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,

With what officious haste dost thou obey!

Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets

Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,          [55]

But if his king or country claim his aid,

The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;

Ev’n so thy brutal valour is displayed,

Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,

But when great Love the onset does command,    [60]

Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand.

Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,

Through all the town a common fucking-post,

On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt

As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,    [65]

May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,

Or in consuming weepings waste away;

May strangury and stone thy days attend;

May’st thou ne’er piss, who did refuse to spend

When all my joys did on false thee depend.           [70]

 

   And may ten thousand abler pricks agree

   To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

 

 

 

The Disappointment

Aphra Behn

 

1

ONE Day the Amarous Lisander,

By an impatient Passion sway’d,

Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,

Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;

All things did with his Love conspire,

The gilded Planet of the Day,

In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,

Was now descending to the Sea,

And left no Light to guide the World,

But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.     10

 

2

In alone Thicket, made for Love,

Silent as yielding Maids Consent,

She with a charming Languishment

Permits his force, yet gently strove ?

Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,

But not to put him back design’d,

Rather to draw him on inclin’d,

Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;

Resistance ’tis to late to shew,

She wants the pow’r to say — Ah! what do you do? 20

 

3

Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,

Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,

Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :

And whispring softly in his Ear,

She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,

Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?

My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,

I cannot — must not give — retire,

Or take that Life whose chiefest part

I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart.             30

 

4

But he as much unus’d to fear,

As he was capable of Love,

The blessed Minutes to improve,

Kisses her Lips, her Neck, her Hair !

Each touch her new Desires alarms !

His burning trembling Hand he prest

Upon her melting Snowy Breast,

While she lay panting in his Arms !

All her unguarded Beauties lie

The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy.                    40

 

5

And now, without Respect or Fear,

He seeks the Objects of his Vows ;

His Love no Modesty allows :

By swift degrees advancing where

His daring Hand that Alter seiz’d,

Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice ;

That awful Throne, that Paradise,

Where Rage is tam’d, and Anger pleas’d ;

That Living Fountain, from whose Trills

The melted Soul in liquid Drops distils.                   50

 

6

Her balmy Lips encountring his,

Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d,

Where both in Transports were confin’d,

Extend themselves upon the Moss.

Cloris half dead and breathless lay,

Her Eyes appear’d like humid Light,

Such as divides the Day and Night;

Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay ;

And now no signs of Life she shows,  cont

But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes. 60

 

7

He saw how at her length she lay,

He saw her rising Bosom bare,

Her loose thin Robes, through which appear

A Shape design’d for Love and Play;

Abandon’d by her Pride and Shame,

She do’s her softest Sweets dispence,

Offring her Virgin-Innocence

A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;

Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,

Unable to perform the Sacrifice.                               70

 

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,

Thee too transported hapless Swain,

Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain :

Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !

The willing Garments by he laid,

And Heav’n all open to his view ;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid.

But oh ! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire !      80

 

9

Natures support, without whose Aid

She can no humane Being give,

It self now wants the Art to live,

Faintness it slacken’d Nerves invade :

In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid

To call his fleeting Vigour back,

No Motion ’twill from Motion take,

Excess of Love his Love betray’d ;

In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,

Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.                     90

 

 10

In this so Am’rous cruel strife,

Where Love and Fate were too severe,

The poor Lisander in Despair,

Renounc’d his Reason with his Life.

Now all the Brisk and Active Fire

That should the Nobler Part inflame,

Unactive Frigid, Dull became,

And left no Spark for new Desire ;

Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move,

Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.      100

 

11

Cloris returning from the Trance

Which Love and soft Desire had bred,

Her tim’rous Hand she gently laid,

Or guided by Design or Chance,

Upon that Fabulous Priapus,

That Potent God (as Poets feign.)

But never did young Shepherdess

(Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain)

More nimbly draw her Fingers back,

Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake.           110

 

12

Then Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,

Finding that God of her Desires

Disarm’d of all his pow’rful Fires,

And cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew.

Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess ?

The Blood forsook the kinder place,

And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,

Which both Disdain and Shame express ;

And from Lisanders Arms she fled,

Leaving him fainting on the gloomy Bed.                   120

 

13

Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,

Or Daphne from the Delphick God ;

No Print upon the Grassie Road

She leaves, t’ instruct pursuing Eyes.

The Wind that wanton’d in her Hair,

And with her ruffled Garments plaid,

Discover’d in the flying Maid

All that the Gods e’re made of Fair.

So Venus, when her Love was Slain,

With fear and haste flew o’re the fatal Plain.            130

 

14

The Nymphs resentments, none but I

Can well imagin, and Condole ;

But none can guess Lisander‘s Soul,

But those who sway’d his Destiny :

His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms,

And not one God, his Fury spares,

He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,

But more the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.                 140

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Sir George Etherege

 

AFTER a pretty amorous discourse,          

She does resist my love with pleasing force;        

Moved not with anger, but with modesty,            

Against her will she is my enemy.             

Her eyes the rudeness of her arms excuse,                   5

Whilst those accept what these seem to refuse; 

To ease my passion and to make me blest            

The obliging smock falls from her whiter breast.

Then with her lovely hands she does conceal      

Those wonders chance so kindly did reveal.                  10

In vain, alas! her nimble fingers strove   

To shield her beauties from my greedy love:       

Guarding her breasts, her lips she did expose,    

To save a lily she must lose a rose.          

So many charms she has in every place,                     15

A hundred hands cannot defend each grace.       

Sighing at length her force she does recall,          

For since I must have part she’ll give me all.        

Her arms the joyful conqueror embrace,              

And seem to guide me to the sought-for place:           20

Her love is in her sparkling eyes express’d,           

She falls o’ the bed for pleasure more than rest.

But oh, strange passion! oh, abortive joy!            

My zeal does my devotion quite destroy:             

Come to the temple where I should adore                    25

My saint, I worship at the sacred door;  

Oh, cruel chance! the town which did oppose     

My strength so long, now yields to my dispose;  

When overjoy’d with victory I fall            

Dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall,                       30

Without the usual ceremony, we             

Have both fulfilled the amorous mystery;             

The action which we should have jointly done,   

Each has unluckily perform’d alone;        

The union which our bodies should enjoy,                    35

The union of our eager souls destroy.     

Our flames are punish’d by their own excess,     

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Fruition was the question in debate,       

Which like so hot a casuist I state,           

That she my freedom urged as my offense          

To teach my reason to subdue my sense;             

But yet this angry cloud, that did proclaim                    5

Volleys of thunder, melted into rain;       

And this adult’rate stamp of seeming nice,          

Made feigned virtue but a bawd to vice;

For, by a compliment that’s seldom known,         

She thrusts me out, and yet invites me home;              10

And these denials, but advance delight, 

As prohibition sharpens appetite;            

For the kind curtain raising my esteem,  

To wonder as the opening of the scene, 

When of her breast her hands the guardians were,    15

Yet I salute each sullen officer:  

Tho’ like the flaming sword before my eyes,        

They block the passage to my paradise; 

Nor could those tyrant-hands so guard the coin,

But love, where’t cannot purchase, may purloin:         20

For tho’ her breasts are hid, her lips are prize,    

To make me rich beyond my avarice;      

Yet my ambition my affection fed,           

To conquer both the white rose and the red.      

The event proved true, for on the bed she sate           25

And seemed to court what she had seemed to hate;       

Heat of resistance had increased her fire,            

And weak defense is turned to strong desire.      

What unkind influence could interspose,              

When two such stars did in conjunction close?            30

Only too hasty zeal my hopes did foil,    

Pressing to feed her lamp, I spilt my oil; 

And that which most reproach upon me hurled, 

Was dead to her, gives life to all the world,         

Nature’s chief prop, and motion’s primest source,      35

In me lost both their figure and their force.         

Sad conquest! When it is the victor’s fate,           

To die at the entrance of the op’ning gate:          

Like prudent corporations had we laid    

A common stock by, we’d improved our trade;            40

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.     

When next in such assaults I chance to be,          

Give me less vigour, more activity;          

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;      45

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.