As Scarriet explained, the good sex poem is rare.
Ancient sex poems are mostly gasbaggy and vulgar.
Aesthetics concerns beauty.
This is not to say that exquisite words cannot tastefully embrace the erotic, but the demands of the poem are severe: not beauty alone, nor taste alone, but the beautiful and the tasteful together defines all that has to do with the muse.
The finest poetry cannot be raunchy—poetry and sex have different ends, different advertising, different careers.
Sex in a poem is either sexy—and not really a poem, or not sexy and a poem, perhaps. Love is allowed to hint at sex, just as offspring, sighs, or poems by Keats, do.
Love may be capable of uniting poetry and sex in an individual’s mind, but not in the public’s eyes. The poet, no matter what state of ecstasy happens to grip him, can never forget the eyes of the public. Humiliation is the issue, not morality. The public will smirk and condemn what even the priest will pardon.
The cult of Keats, in which the effeminate poet, dying young, creates a ‘Death and the Maiden,’ or ‘Death and the Poet’ trope, urges any poet seeking fame to express sex tastefully and symbolically in terms of death. This cult (an English flower of German Romanticism) was still all the rage in the early 20th century. I say sex, because how else to describe:
“I have been half in love with easeful death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!”
The nightingale, Keats’ earthly alter-ego, feels “ecstasy” as Death is courted by the male poet (a striking reversal of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ theme in which Death courts the maiden). Keats “called him (Death) soft names.”
This Melancholy Garden Eroticism perfected by Keats (d 1821), continued with Tennyson (d 1892) :
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late…’
***
She is coming, my own, my sweet,
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
And carried on by Wilfred Owen (d 1918) :
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.”
The cult of Keats made it possible for an English soldier writing of his fallen comrades to use the trope of erotic love: “red lips,” “stained stones kissed,” “kindness of wooed and wooer,” and “shame.” in a perfectly appropriate manner.
T S. Eliot changed poetry and ended the cult of Keats by striking out in a different (anti-heroic, almost comic) direction:
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Eliot’s famous “patient etherized upon a table” image is a weird, jarring rebuke to Love, Sex, and Death Romanticism.
Whether Eliot, or poetry itself, believed the cult of Keats had run its course, Eliot’s 20th century fame actively coincided with the decline of Romanticism.
Initially searching for sex poems for the Scarriet March Madness Tournament—and pondering how the theme of sex and death (or love and death) is so powerful that it is almost the theme of poetry itself has been quite a journey.
We don’t mean to diminish the influence of Keats by calling it a “cult”—though some Moderns may have perceived Keats’ iconic hold on poetry as such. If passion is required for poetry, but only as a product of good taste, Keats should be celebrated for saving us from trendy poetry which is merely iconoclastic and obscure.
Keats was not a love poet.
Keats was not, in fact, sentimental—at least as we commonly think of that term.
Keats gave us, in the vessel of great poetry, sex which is not sex. Tasteful and honorable passion, which is the guiding star, perhaps, of poetry itself. (And here his poem “Bright Star” comes to mind.)
John Berryman (d 1972), in one of the world’s most sex-obsessed poems, Dream Song 4, runs smack into the whole dilemma of passion which society frowns upon, and which even the dallying muse forbids. Recall how the poem ends?
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
***
The slob beside her feasts … What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.
Every brilliant line of this “sex poem” acutely and despairingly advances its theme. The “four other people” are not described because the poet only cares about her (and the husband). She is “filling her…body.” Berryman’s restaurant could be in the Rome of Augustus—except the observer is fully passive (“Modern”). (“Am not prince Hamlet.”)
Berryman’s “sex poem” doesn’t depict people having sex. In fact, the mere thought of it for Beryman is against the “law.”
Moral laws coincide with poetic laws—otherwise the “sexy” poem will be an escapist fantasty, or worse, realistically vulgar.
The dilemma is not that sex is morally forbidden; it is aesthetically forbidden.
Passion must be indirectly conveyed.
Great art’s great law.
Sappho is perhaps the most beloved ancient love poet (based mostly on fragments!) because of one poem—which shows us how it is done; the dramatically indirect—the agony of separation which fuels the desire—invokes exactly the kind of passion nearly all memorable lyric poetry needs:
THE ARBOR -SAPPHO (612 B.C.)
He seems to be a god, that man
Facing you, who leans to be close,
Smiles, and, alert and glad, listens
To your mellow voice
And quickens in love at your laughter
That stings my breasts, jolts my heart
If I dare the shock of a glance.
I cannot speak.
My tongue sticks to my dry mouth,
Thin fire spreads beneath my skin,
My eyes cannot see and my aching ears
Roar in their labyrinths.
Chill sweat glides down my back,
I shake, I turn greener than grass.
I am neither living nor dead and cry
From the narrow between.
This ancient poem by Sappho, the 19th century “Nightingale” by Keats and the modern one by Berryman all share one overriding trope: the immediacy of the (passive) speaker’s feelings; nothing really happens, nothing really needs to happen, the poem doesn’t stretch out into a story; everything lives in the present, almost a cry more than a fiction; but since thought is infinite, the delicate observations which unfold subtly in these passionate poems are all the epic story-telling one really needs. The lyric poem as the world; a feeling, one “compact and delicious” feeling—is finally the only thing our soul, and every fiction under the heavens, requires.
Marla Muse
Colombo, Sri Lanka