Day Thirty-Six and HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!!
Posted by Elisa Beatty Feb 14 2011, 3:00 am
How wonderful to have an entire holiday devoted to love! Each day this week I’ll be posting a different love poem, starting with these ancient fragments from the Greek poet Sappho, which suggest falling love has always felt much like it does today:
That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens
to your sweet voice
and your enticing laughter—
that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast.
For whenever I look at you even briefly
I can no longer say a single thing,
but my tongue is frozen in silence;
instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
with my eyes I see nothing;
my ears make a whirring noise.
A cold sweat covers me,
trembling seizes my body,
and I am greener than grass.
Addison
After all these years, the grass has been singed, so there are brown spots, and the cold sweat isn’t happening, but the constancy, the low-burning fire waiting to flare with a touch, is so much better. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“the low burning fire waiting to flare with a touch”…you’re a poet yourself, Gwynlyn!!
The ancients know how to make it plain…and fancy.
I love the eroticism of the poems in the Song of Solomon like this one:
Open to me, my sister, my love,
my dove, my perfect one;
for my head is wet with dew,
my locks with the drops of the night.
I had put off my garment;
how could I put it on again?
I had bathed my feet;
how could I soil them?
My beloved thrust his hand into
the opening,
and my inmost being yearned for him.
Amazing stuff….
Puts me in mind of the Sumerian “Courtship of Innana and Dumuzi”…
I perfumed my sides with ointment,
I coated my mouth with sweet-smelling amber,
I painted my eyes with kohl.
He shaped my loins with his fair hands.
Amazing imagery all the way through (and modern romance writers have NOTHING on the Sumerians for finding inventive ways to refer to what’s going on.)
I also love that the courtship starts with a quarrel, with Inanna insistently rejecting Dumuzi in favor of another:
The word they had spoken
Was a word of desire.
From the starting of the quarrel
Came the lovers desire.
What a poem!!!!