Classic Erotic Verse

Rummaging through my poetry collection for something vaguely Valentine-related – Burns, Sonnets from the Portuguese, even Classic FM’S 100 Favourite Love Poems – I came across this. Be warned: soppy hearts and pretty flowers it most definitely isn’t, even if some of your favourite garden-centre poets are here – Wordsworth, for instance, and Herrick, who elsewhere lamented, “Fair daffodils, we weep to see / You haste away so soon”. He’s less preoccupied with horticultural matters here, viz: “I abhor the slimy kiss / Which to me most loathsome is. / Those lips please me which are placed / Close, but not too strictly laced; / Yielding I would have them, yet / Not a wimbling tongue admit. / What should poking-sticks make there, / When the ruff is set elsewhere?” The title poem is by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, infamous 17th-century bisexual libertine whose X-certificate verses leave little if anything to the imagination. The same goes for Stella Gonet’s passionate – no, let’s not mince words, pornographic – reading of Swinburne’s “In the Orchard”. And prurient to boot, because the lovers writhing in the moonlight are clearly male. “Nay, slay me now; nay, for I will be slain; / Pluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain . . . Slay me ere day can slay desire again; / Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.” Erotic doesn’t have to be hot and sweaty. Heaven forbid that anyone should mention sweat and Emily Dickinson, belle of Amherst, in the same breath, but something surely must have loosened just a little, a hairpin, a button, as she wrote “Wild nights! Wild nights! / Were I with thee, / Wild nights should be / Our luxury! // Futile the winds / To a heart in a port, / Done with the compass, / Done with the chart. // Rowing in Eden! / Ah! the sea! / Might I but moor / Tonight in thee.” With contributions from Hafez, Baudelaire, Tsao Chih, Whitman etc, you get a feel for what turns lovers from other cultures on. Long hair does it for Persians, knitting for Chinese. My favourite is “The Connoisseuse of Slugs” by Sharon Olds, which disgusted me first time round – I hate creepy crawlies – but now makes me laugh out loud. She’s right – erotic doesn’t have to mean serious, either. Sex can be hilarious, especially when you’re comparing naked men becoming aroused to the little knobs popping out at the top of a slug’s antennae: “The slow / elegant being coming out of hiding and / gleaming in the dark air, eager and so / trusting you could weep.” Bravo, Ms Olds.

Sue Arnold, The Guardian