Sea Shells

 

     Who as a child did not prize among treasured possessions a collection of sea shells?  Many were souvenirs, gathered along the shore during vacations, others may have been gifts or curio shop purchases.  Many of us were undiscriminating; while fancying the novel and colorful, we prized ordinary specimens hardly less.  We may have in fact been developing a subtler taste.  A receptive eye will find magic in every broken sand dollar!  Somehow a good many conch shells had been carried far from the Caribbean; those that had escaped the indignity of being made into lamps could be used for the meditative purpose of “hearing the ocean.”  Wordsworth, receptive always to commonplace profundities, describes a “curious child” listening to a shell and experiencing thereby a “Mysterious union with his native sea.” As if this were not enough, he explicates: “Even in such a shell the Universe itself/ Is to the ear of Faith.” [1]

     But that calming mantra proceeding from the pink and pearly threshold of the conch’s extraordinary home is hardly the only appeal of shells.   A handful of commonplace shells, in a box in the back of a drawer, sitting amid a few grains of sand, can renew the wonder of an encounter with the immensities of the sea.  Though hard and calcareous, there is something in the unique opalescent cream-tones so common in malacological collections reminiscent of milk and semen and the bright heart of things. 

     Even to a child, shells might be in many ways instructive apart from their beauty.  I once collected a pailful of living Pacific mollusks and left them outside my motel door, expecting to play with them again as I had on the beach, but found the heap a sad and stinking mess of death the next day, a disturbing elemental revelation of mortality.  

     The wonder such objects inspire is evident not only in memories of childhood, but also in the earlier days of our species.  Large architectural shells have been fashioned into trumpets since palaeolithic times, though the details of their original uses must remain obscure.  We know, however, about Poseidon’s son Triton, usually represented as a merman, his lower half a fish, who, in his role as herald or messenger for Poseidon blew a large shell, perhaps a conch (though today the Charonia, a large sea snail, is commonly called Triton's trumpet).  After the flood that left only Deucalion and Pyrrha surviving, Triton manifests at Neptune’s behest to sound his shell-trumpet, and the waters only then take heed and begin to retreat.  According to Ovid Triton was draped “in purple shells,” and the fact is that the Murex snail’s shells were used to produce the very prestigious Tyrian purple dye, called also royal purple and Phoenician red. 

     Shell trumpets were in fact used in battle just as bugles are today. [2]  To the Greeks of Classical times, they already seemed a sign of a primitive people.  Thus in Euripedes [3] it is used by the backward Taurians, while Theocritus describes its use a Bebrycian in  Bithynia. [4]  In Vergil Misenus played his concha like a virtuoso and dared the gods to outdo him whereupon Triton threw him to the rocks to drown. [5]  Even in antiquity’s sunset, Nonnos tells us that Dionysos can be heard, blowing a shell trumpet amid troops of bacchantes and satyrs as he speeds into battle against the Indians. [6]The Indians would have recognized the consch as an emblem of Vishnu.  The Japanese similarly used shell trumpets, called jinkai, in war, as did the Aztecs who called theirs quiquiztli and many South Pacific peoples, including Fijians (davui), and Maoris (pūtātara). 

     War is not the only theater in which the dramatic sound of the shell trumpet plays a role.  Shell trumpets are used in in the Japanese Buddhist goma ritual of the Shingon and Shugendo sects.  In Polynesia, South America and the Caribbean, they have been used for calls to prayer, funerals, and in apotropaic rituals.  In Malta such instruments are called bronja or tronga and are used for less portentous occasions, blown to notify farmers that the windmills are operating and capable of grinding grain.  Today conch-blowing performers greet cruise passengers in the Marquesas and entertain the patrons of the Hyatt Regency in Honolulu.

      Sea shells may signify love as well as war.  The beauty of cowries is suggested by the fact that the word porcelain derives from the old Italian term for the animal (porcellana).  The lovely complementarity of the one side swelling outward in a smooth mound and the other side with its rippled vent, opening into an unseeable mystery, may have contributed to the shell’s acquisition of symbolic value through association with the female genitals, as attested by both the common name in ancient Rome concha veneris and the scientific subfamily today – Cypraeidae.   Native people in California’s Great Basin called the shells in their own language, “cunts” and prepared their dinner with a phallic mortar and a pestle bowl rimmed in cowries, considering their subsistence and thus their kitchenware hallowed as a gift of coyote. [7]  Today many New Age and African-oriented websites market cowries as a “fertility charm.” 

     Cowrie-shaped amulets are found in ancient Egypt, often in the form of belts or girdles worn about women’s waists, often along with other symbols of generation such as tattoos of Bes.  Cowries of pure gold that accompanied Princess Sithathoryunet to her tomb almost four thousand years ago contained metal balls that would tinkle as she moved, likely providing an apotropaic effect similar to that of the Roman phallic tintinnabulae.

     Perhaps the value acquired through these connotations played a role in the widespread use of cowries for money in Africa and Asia as well as ancient Egypt.  They have found myriad other uses as well, among them as aids in contacting the Orixás in New World settings reflecting Yoruba tradition, called búzios in the practice of Candomblé and Umbanda and in Santería called diloggún.  They are used in divination by the Kaniyar Panicker in Kerala, a group today designated a “backward tribe” by the government though their advanced academies of astrology, ayurvedic medicine, and philosophy gave them once the reputation of scholars.  Less magical uses include the control of livestock according to Plutarch [8]. 

     The story of the miraculous appearance of dew in Gideon’s fleece, taken as a type of the conception of Christ, led to the association of shells with the Virgin Mary.  This connection, prominent in the treatment of the Physiologus [9] associated shells with Mary and a pearl, like the dew Gideon saw, as a representation of the Incarnation.  The round and perfect pearl, according to the second century writer, “removes the uncleanness of the sea” as Christ forgives sin.  In addition the author says that the two shells of a bivalve signify the two Testaments.  Supported by other church fathers [10] and by the continuing popularity of various versions of the Physiologus, shells found their way into religious iconography in paintings by Piero della Francesca and others.  In the dome of Pisa’s cathedral an annunciation scene includes a shell and pearl and the legend rore coelesti foecundor (“heaven’s dew will make me fruitful”). 

     Because of their habitats not far from Santiago de Campostela, scallop shells were one of the first popular souvenirs.  Symbolic of pilgrimage, they are today visible as icons on signs along the route today.   Such shells were also used in baptism and included in the design of baptismal fonts long after they were no longer used. 

     Those if us of a certain age encountered in school a more generally spiritual metaphor in Holmes’ “The Chambered Nautilus,” while Tennyson found a shell a “miracle” of beauty though he felt he had to ornament the natural object with fanciful images.

 

Did he stand at the diamond door           

Of his house in a rainbow frill?   

Did he push, when he was uncurl’d,        

A golden foot or a fairy horn       

Thro’ his dim water-world?  [11]

  

     Material facts determine in part the fascination of sea shells.  These mollusks and other creatures occupy our world, but in a dimension most people never enter.  A cliché of scuba divers likens their experiences to those of astronauts in space (including virtual weightlessness), but the land beneath the sea is busy with a myriad strange animals.  Vertebrates share a common body structure; the bones of mice and men very nearly match, and even insects and fish have predictable body parts, but submarine life seems freed from all prescriptions, capable of taking practically any shape: sea stars, octopus, sea horse, jellyfish, coral.   Animals like bivalves have, perhaps fortunately for the diner who likes them on the half-shell, no identifiable organs.  Apart from its viscous softness and vulnerability, little sign of its life reaches us.  Once seized from their home, shellfish become mute and stubbornly unwilling to reveal their secrets with the fortunate exception of their subtle and ravishing flavor.   

     During the hyperaesthetic Heian period in Japan when aristocrats enjoyed poetry improvisation competitions called uto-amare, a game developed called e-awase in which the players painted small pictures in clam shells on assigned topics.  In its later Kamakura form kai-awase the shells were prepainted and the object of the game was to find matching pairs (called male and female) in a set of three hundred and sixty painted shells.  Today many such shells available in tourist shops are decorated with decals rather than painted and the actual game is seldom played.

       A shell is by definition a concealment, hiding a mystery within.  If its contents remain incognito, what one may see provides a marvelous distraction.  Some shells have intricate sculptural reliefs like angel-wings or painted patterns like even the humble cockle.  The channeled duck clam is often pure white and features the most delicate and tasteful minimalist lines, while the sundial snail (scientific name is the grand Architectonica perspectiva) seen from above resembles not so much a garden timekeeper as a cosmic whorl, an image of the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. 

     The creatures of the sea approach us as well through smell and taste as they are perhaps the most delectable of human foods for those willing to eat flesh.  The saline taste of the ocean enhances the full and rounded sweetness of clams and of oysters, at once so rich and so austere.  Mussels are a more frugal delight, their orange-pink bodies savory and fine, their broth little short of elixir.  Once, in a Seattle restaurant, I ordered scallops on the half-shell and discovered that rare thing, a new pleasure, with little in common with the abductor muscles labeled scallops in the supermarket 

      Looking at shells is like looking through a telescope at stars or through a microscope at a cell or exploring the interior of the body or the cryptic chambers of the mind.  If these creatures can inspire people to war, to bed, to the table and to church, they thereby associate themselves with the most significant realms of human desire.  Still, if they inspire some to poetry, they send others off for an afternoon nap.  A graceful note in a Renaissance painting or a kitschy ashtray.  They provide a glimpse into a new world, utterly foreign to everyday experience yet drawing the eye with irresistible beauty.  The student of sea shells, like the diner facing a plate of clams and oysters, will in the end find an intimate relevance to human life in these elegant and exotic animals. 

 

    

 

1.  “The Sea Shell.”

2.  The battle trumpet of the ancient Hebrew-speaking people was, of course, no shell at all, but a horn, the shofar.  See, for instance, Judges 6:34 or Joshua 6:4-20.

 

3.  Iphigenia in Tauris. 303.  Ares wields a shell trumpet according to Lycophron.

 

4.  Idyll 22, l. 75.  Bithyina is also a genus of snails.

 

5.  Aeneid 6.171ff

 

6.  Dionysiaca 17.93-94.

 

7.  Henry Koerper, “Cowry Shells: Fertility/Fecundity Symbols In Southern California Iconography,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology Vol. 23, No. 1.

 

8.  Table-Talk, 7.8, 713B.

 

9.  XXIV.

 

10.  Isidore, for instance, says that pearls are conceived by means of celestial (caelestis) dew

(Etymologies 12.6).  See also Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Efrem the Syrian.

 

11.  “The Shell” in Maud I.

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.