Frank Kermode Forms of Attention led me to be acquainted with a Donne poem that I had not studied in school and if I had it might have been recuperated in workings of allegory as Kermode reports “Attempts were made to preserve it [Donne’s fame] in an epoch professing different standards, and having different notions of excellence, but even in the early seventeenth century they have a somewhat desperate air, as when a commentator argues that ‘The Good Morrow’ is not a wickedly erotic poem but an address to God; and that the lesbian epistle ‘Sappho to Philænis’ is an allegory of the relationship between Christ and his church.”
Sappho to Philænis [Literally ‘Female Friend’]
[…]
And yet I grieve the less, lest grief remove
My beauty, and make me unworthy of thy love.
[…]
My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,
But so as thine from one another do;
And, O, no more; the likeness being such,Why should they not alike in all parts touch?
Introduction by Ilona Bell to John Donne: Collected Poetry
If Donne’s portrayal of Sappho arouses male voyeurs — and it pays to look closely at the ending — it also gives female creativity and female pleasure a voice that vies with the much-vaunted ‘masculine persuasive force’ of ‘Elegy 11. On His Mistress’.
So much depends on the placement of “touch”. I really like how it is prepared by the twist of narcissistic loss braided to the argument that sorrow would make the speaker unattractive.
And so for day 1517
07.02.2011