EROS AND THE EROTICS OF WRITING
AWP MEETING, April, 2001
RICHARD JACKSON


In the last of his Twenty Poems of Love, Neruda writes:"I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her." That contradiction, which is at the heart of western poetry from Sappho's denials through Petrarch oxymorons to Edna St. Vincent Millay's seeming detachments, is a central form of the basic tension that generates lyric poetry. Throughout the poem Neruda attempts to keep a distance from a love he simply cannot remain distant from. The poem begins:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

As the poem progresses we understand that the self consciousness of the first line is an attempt to take the edge off the sadness, a strategy he continues with the casual "for example" in the next line, and the deflection of his inner turmoil into the shattering, shivering and revolving of the world around him. By the sixth line, he tries to diminish the love itself by ascribing the word "sometimes" to the beloved. But then the poem bursts out in the next four lines into an emotional memory, only to use the word 'sometimes" to describe his own love, and then offer a rationalization as he again pulls back and detaches himself:

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How can one not have loved her great still eyes.

The fact that this night is similar to the love making nights only reminds him more strongly, brings back those feelings of love, and so of hurt, and the word 'endless" suggests an ironic counterpoint to the loss, but also a sense of the intensity of their passion. That leads to her "sometime" love becoming love per se, and as he pulls back from his hurt, his love becomes occasional:"sometimes I loved her too." Then he offers his rationalization which now sounds more like an excuse for what could not be helped despite his rational self.

The poem continues like this, alternating and arguing with itself, and gradually expanding its references-- the night is immense, there is the singing of someone "in the distance," and his soul searches for her through his sight and heart:

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

But even as these stakes widen the present emotion becomes more intense:the sigh searches "as though" to approach her, the simile insuring a kind of safe distance for the emotions, but in the next line the flat statement"she is not with me" brings that emotional hurt home again. The effect of all this is like a camera zooming in and out as it pans across a landscape, progressing and yet alternating perspectives. In the end he arrives at a conclusion he tried to avoid at the beginning that also reveals the power of his opening restraint:

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last lines that I write for her.

The counterpointing of loving and not loving on the part of both lovers, of this one night and the endless sky, of change and constancy, passion and detachment, creates incredible power and tension. The repetition of certain lines and phrases, often with variants, ads to the insistence and intensity while at the same time suggesting change. In the end the speaker admits what he was trying to avoid in order to avoid the feeling of pain as endless nights become transformed into the potential end of writing.

In many ways, then, the poem reveals some essential aspects of the lyric:its dramatic unfolding, its quickly shifting perspectives, its attempt to deny the pain of what it knows; but also it reveals the very pleasure of writing, of writing the saddest lines. After all, the poet "can" write the saddest lines tonight for the gradually uncovered love in the course of the poem creates a context for them-- which suggests that the last lines are posed, part of the inevitable progress of the language of the poem that is also about the poem itself. Which is not to suggest a lack of dramatic power, but on the contrary an intensification of the power when we understand that there is also a tension between the speaker and the poet, the speaker suffering the effects of the lost love and the poet able to rationally construct the poem about it. The poet's knowledge of the speaker's condition actually enhances the emotion. This is an aspect of the lyric that often goes unnoticed or ignored, even denied by students who often see the effect of the poem in the theme per se and not in the artistry, who often see no veil between speaker and poet, triggering event , as Hugo calls it, and poem. One metaphor for this is the way the poet Neruda gradually becomes enthralled by the language of the poem-- seduced by it, so that the writing itself becomes an erotic act.

Take Marvin Bell's "Trees as Standing for Something" which begins with a statement about trees ("More and more I am happy with trees") then a description of where he is observing them (waking, in bed, with a woman) so that very quickly what the trees stand for becomes obvious:

For my loves are like the leaves in summer.
But oh!, when they fall, and I wake with a start,
Will I feel the sting of betrayal and ask, What is this
Love, if it has to end, even in death,
Or if one might lose it even during a life?

Better to die of it, or into it, or despite it now, he seems to answer. But then the second part of the poem begins with a description of cutting down tress--and loves--but ends with an end to such speculation as the lover seduces him in the text itself. The poem itself, what he will "say" is reduced to its essential erotic component, the repetiton of the word "oh" now transformed from the inquisitive "oh" from earlier in the poem:

What was I to say then but Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!
Now you see a man at peace, happy and happier yet,
With her breath on the back of his neck in the morning,
And of course you assume it must always have been this way.
But what was I to say, then and now, but Oh! And Oh! Oh!

The poem ends ecstatically, having talked itself into a kind of orgasmic play with the language.

The erotics of writing, of language itself, the mere "pleasure of the text," as Roland Barthes calls it, is often overlooked, but it is an essential concept that can help us understand what we do as writers, how we respond to our own poems as they evolve. By focusing on poems that deal explicitly with erotics, we can uncover some essential principles. Anne Carson, in her Eros:The Bittersweet, devotes a whole book to the subject of the erotic by examining Sappho's poetry. Eros, she says, "denotes 'want,' 'lack,' desire for what is missing," and it is this very desire to substitute for some sort of void or absence that is at the heart of so much lyric poetry. In this, the erotic poem reflects all poems:"a poem is never finished, only abandoned," as Valery wrote, suggesting something of the endless desire, the sense of lack that motivates poetry. At the poem's heart, Carson says, is the sort of tension and contradiction we saw in Neruda's poem. The Roman poet Catullus provides an epigrammatic motto for us here:

I hate and I love. Why? you might ask.
I don't know. I am confused and hurt.

Carson quotes form the Greek Anthology to further support the point:

If you Love me, you hate me. And if you hate me, you love me.
Now if you don't hate me, beloved, don't love me.

As she points out, the essence of the erotic is confusion-- of emotions, of boundaries. What this means for us is that the erotic poem becomes a gradual movement through these confusions, as in Neruda's poem, towards what Frost called the poem's final stance as a "momentary stay against confusion." Looking at the way these tensions are resolved, in other words, gives us a good idea of the way any poem moves through a dramatic "arc" of movement, and also suggests something of the pleasure itself of writing, of the erotics of writing.

Sappho's fragment 31 enacts this dramatic movement:

he seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing -- oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left for me

no:tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead -- or almost
I seem to me

The poem begins as a description of her friend and her friend's lover, with a hint of erotic desire, but by the fifth line with its exclamatory "oh" the speaker becomes focused only on the girl and herself. She moves from the metaphoric heart on wings to the more physical "tongue" and more insistent sense impressions of "fire" and "drumming" to the "cold sweat" and "shaking" of the last stanza. She is, in other words, gradually overcome. Certainly jealousy, as Carson and others point out, is the root cause here, but what sets the last three stanzas off is the quick move in stanza one from the man to "you" and her "sweet speaking" which links the girl to the sweet speaking of the narrator through her poem. The erotic situation is resolved poetically by a sense of utter loss as death, but remains unresolved, in constant tension in terms of the dramatic situation. And we can add that the poet Sappho adds a kind of fourth figure here, who understands what the speaker is going through and takes a sort of erotic pleasure in that, in her own 'sweet speaking," just at Neruda takes an erotic pleasure in the sad lines of his own poem. The author, in a sense, takes a vicarious pleasure in the speaker's situation:there is always an ironic context that serves to heighten the tension.

Horace is certainly one of the most ironic poets we have. "Those wars, Venus, are long over," an older Horace writes in Ode 4.1, hoping that all the trials of his past erotic life will not follow him into old age. As an alternative he describes how Venus and Eros should instead pick on Paulus, a younger man, but in writing the description Horace's own words inflame him, and he addresses an old friend:
Ah, Ligurius, why
does a tear now and then run trickling down my cheek?
Why does my tongue, once eloquent,
contain, even as I'm talking, this ungracious silence?

As the poem ends, Horace has created in words the object of his erotic desire:

At night I see you in my dream,
now caught, and I hold you, now I follow as
you flee, over the grassy
Field of mars, over flowing streams, with your hard heart.

The very act of writing the poem has created the object of desire, yet the poem itself can never finally contain this imagined other. The projection is always in the present, the repeated use of "now" as opposed to the poem's opening emphasis on the past, and the love wars referred to in the beginning are replaced by the actual or metaphoric fields of Mars suggesting a deeper, more mortal wound to the heart than the poet suspected at the opening. The poem, in short, has created a more erotic situation than it set out to deny. This process of discovery, of uncovering an emotion we didn't know was there, is perhaps the central driving impulse of the process of making poems.

In fact, just a little after Horace, another Roman poet, Ovid, turned Horace's irony into his main subject, and established the ironic basis for love poetry in the west. He begins the first book of his Amores with a parody of Virgil's Aeneid: "Arms, warfare, violence -- I was winding up to produce a / Regular epic," but quickly reports that he taunted Cupid-- Roman Eros-- in this approach and Cupid repayed him by making him change his hexameter epic form to elegiacs (alternating 6 and 5 beat lines) and consequently the change in form led to a change in subject:love. Ovid then reports that he has been a prisoner of the erotic ever since, though by the third elegy he is already making claims to a potential mistress that his verse will make her immortal, and so establishes perhaps our first poetics of the erotic, or the erotics of poetry. This is something he continues through many of the stories in the Metamorphoses. In one story, for example, Apollo, god of poetry, chases after Daphne because he, like Ovid, taunted Cupid-Eros and was stricken with love, while Daphne on the other hand was stricken with coldness. After being chased by poetry through proverbial hill and dale she asks Jupiter to be turned into a laurel tree, is granted that wish, and so escapes Apollo-poetry. However, he still expresses his love, and she tilts a branch to him; he vows that the laurel will be the poet's crown forever (something Petrarch will later play off on in calling his love Laura). Again the erotic and the poetic are linked:for Ovid, who describes Apollo in bestial metaphors during the chase, and emphasizes not only the external changes in appearance but internal changes in attitude, poetry itself thus becomes a continual metamorphosis, a continual progress towards something that is never achieved-- what Carson calls one of the hallmarks of the erotic. This sense of the poem as process, as dramatic enactment, is something that the Romantic poets such as Keats and Wordsworth, who we will look at later, continually emphasize with their numerous poems subtitled 'a fragment" or containing circular structures such as Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," their endings that are beginnings like Keats "To Autumn" where the songs of winter are subtly replaced by spring songs through a verbal ambiguity, or Wordsworth's great epic titled "The Prelude."

What is crucial in all these examples so far is the ability of the poet to create the erotic from the text that the speaker utters:the poem itself, the language, is the source of the erotic. It is this ability to create the erotic beloved in the act of writing that motivates Cavafy's "Half an Hour" where "a few words...and nothing more" are enough because:

Art's people, by intensity of mind,
and then naturally for just a little while, sometimes create
no:tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
and the attempt to sustain, repeat, the poem's moment:

Because
for all the imagination, for all the magic spirit of the wine,
I needed to see your lips as well,
I needed to have your body close to me.

Such repetition, any word "extravagantly repeated" or else surprising and therefore "unexpected, succulent in its newness" creates the erotic according to Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text. Yet, once again, as in Horace, the repeated words fail to sustain the sense of presence that they create:the poem, the moment, the half hour all end. Goethe, who understood the erotics of language, placed Eros in an elegiac format. In his Roman Elegy VII, he describes the relationship between body and language as "seeing with a vision that feels, feeling with a fingers that see"--

Often I even compose poetry in her embraces,
Counting hexameter beats, tapping them out on her back
Softly, with one hand's fingers.

For Whitman, too, perhaps the most extravagant repeater of words and phrases in his catalogues, language is always a language seeking to create and to sustain what it desires. In "Once I Passed Through a Populous City" he remembers not the city he once "imprinted" on his mind but "only a woman I casually met," but now the poem, the language, creates her again just as Horace's description led to a reinvention of the beloved:

Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

And as with Horace, the poem ends with a silence within language, the erotic reality beneath language. "I must not go," he protests, but he does, for the essence of Eros, as all these poets know, is its proximity to Thanatos, to death. The erotic poem, the erotics of writing, create provisional moments of near fulfillment that are almost immediately subverted. The pleasure of the erotics of writing lies exactly in the never ending process of trying to sustain what it creates, yet always failing to do so. The great Italian Romantic Giacomo Leopardi describes this situation in his philosophical reflections when he says that the poet "stands in relation to nature more or less as an ardent and sincere lover, whose love is not returned, stands in relation to the beloved."

Wordsworth's "The Nutting" is probably the most famous example of this relationship. In the poem the poet remembers how as a young boy he would set out from the "threshold" of his cottage into the woods. As memory returns he begins to describe the woods in erotic terms:

O'er pathless rocks,
Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,
Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook
Unvisited, where not a broken bough
Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
Of devastation; but the hazels rose
Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,
A virgin scene!-- A little while I stood,
Breathing with such suppression of the heart
As joy delights in; and, with wise restraint
Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed
The banquet.

After he "luxuriates" in the scene a while, playing among the flowers in this secret "bower," he suddenly rises up himself

And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage:and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being...

Oddly, only when this rape of the woods is enacted does the natural world get personified to the extent that it can "patiently" give up. In describing the scene, in becoming himself almost overwhelmed with its erotic nature, that one jagged monosyllabic line with its dangling phrase at the end ( And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash ) linguistically destroys the balanced syntax that had built to that point as the poet himself reenacts the scene, reexperiences it in language. But then he quickly returns to the balanced syntax and abandons the woods as erotic object in order to address his sister, "Dearest Maiden," --though one could read it also as a direct address to the woods-- in order to come to the conclusion that "there is a spirit in the woods." In this case the poet shies away from the erotics of the poem that he almost unconsciously has created, for it involves not only desire but destruction, not only Eros but Thanatos. He might as well have said there is a fear in these woods, there is a fear in this desire, in this savage, sexual desire to possess.

Whitman, for one, certainly understood how the writing of a poem itself can be an erotic act, though for him it was a much more positive experience-- in fact one he sought out in almost every poem. For him, the beloved's body is the poem:" I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems," he writes in "I Sing the Body Electric," a title that emphasizes not that he sings of the body, but that he sings the body itself. In "Spontaneous Me" the poem itself is described in phallic terms:

This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry...
Love thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,
Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love.....

"Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat," Charles Simic writes in his memoir, A Fly In The Soup. Or here is Fernando Pessoa in a journal entry:" I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities." Roland Barthes describes this same erotics of language in A Lover's Discourse: "Language is a skin:I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact:on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is 'I desire you,' and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush up against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure." Language moves from the skin to all that is beyond it. Gaston Bachelard says in The Poetics of Space :"the reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object and even less as a substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality." That is, the reality of words themselves. For him, this is an area where the "margin" of unreality enters and perturbs us, wakens us--our words suddenly sound strange, like a word we repeat to ourselves over and over again will sound strange, as if it had a life of its own. He says in The Poetics of Reverie : "I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. The words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young." It's language, after all, which allows us to presence the absent. For Bachelard, everything is at stake, possibly, in every word. It creates an effect he calls "intimate immensity," a sense of everything in every little thing, Blake's "infinity in a grain of sand," or "eternity in an hour." The erotics of language, in paying so much attention to the skin, the border between word and thing, poem and world, extends outwards and creates its own world. The poet becomes like both the lover and the beloved in Song Of Songs where the intensely erotic language not only expresses desire but creates a world for that desire to flourish within:when the beloved's neck is described as a tower, or her cheek like half of a pomegranate, the poet starts to bring in countryside and city, and then fills that out with references to cedars, cypresses, various spices, jewels, hillsides, sheep, palm trees, flowers of various sorts and so on. In the dialogue of the poem the call of one to the other is also a call of city to country and country to city, an attempt by each to capture the other in the song itself which becomes the very world, the vineyard itself.

One of Edna St Vincent Millay's early sonnets shows us not only how the erotic can enter into the poem almost against the speaker's will, as in Horace, but how much is at stake, how central the erotic vision can become in one's life. The poem begins with casual talk with a friend, then admits how such talk leads to familiarity, and familiarity to-- well, here is the poem:

We talk of taxes, and I call you friend;
Well, such you are,-- but well we know
How thick about us root, how rankly grow
Those subtle weeds no man has need to tend,
That flourish through neglect, and soon must send
Perfume too sweet upon us and overthrow
Our steady senses:how such matters go
We are aware, and how such matters end.
Yet shall be told no meagre passion here;
With lovers such as we forevermore
Isolde drinks the draught, and Guinevere
Receives the table's ruin through her door,
Francesca, with the loud surf at her ear,
Lets fall the coloured book upon the floor.

The evenly balanced rhythm and rhetoric of the first two lines with their mid point caseuras suggest an order and rational calm that is almost immediately threatened by the enjambed lines and the relatively long rush of lines from the middle of line two to line 8-- a sequence of enjambed lines where the one line ending with a comma is followed by a relative clause that pulls the line over the comma nearly as if it were in fact enjambed-- it is a masterful switch in tone. The "yet" at line nine promises a solution but the examples are all tragic and lead to major upheavals in various states ending with the reference to Francesca that we will look at below in reference to Dante. The simple erotic situation becomes quickly complicated, suggesting a link to death, to dire consequences for the individuals, and to cosmic disruptions.

The erotic, then, always poses a potential link to death:in Greek mythology Eros and Thanatos (death) are always linked. The death can be physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual. On the one hand it might be willed by the speaker, as Dante does in one of his so called "Rime Petrose" where he hopes that his beloved, who has spurned him, hopes that death will split her heart "per mezzo"--down the middle. And he calls her a "homicidal thieving gangster" a few lines later. By the end of the poem he wants the poem itself to travel to the beloved, but travel as an arrow that will strike her through the heart as a kind of lovely vengeance:"che bell'onor s'aquista in far vendetta." Of course, the arrow image is Cupid's and the death is also love itself--an idea we later see Shakespeare playing off upon--so that the end is both an expression of erotic desire for and a death wish for the beloved.

In his "October Ghosts" James Wright describes he and Jenny as already dead, already ghosts:"Jenny cold, Jenny darkness," the poem begins. Then, he associates their lives with the Greek poet Callimachus, with dead miners in Ohio, and then remembering his own family past, and especially a woman stricken with diphtheria when he was young who in turn allows him to describe Death as a lover who lives inside us:

That time is gone when the young women died
Astounded to hear the black veins in their bodies
Coil around one another all night.

A few lines later he links his search for the beloved with all the time and places he has known; the endless search that marks Eros ends in the labyrinth of his own head:

Jenny, fat blossoming grandmother of the dead,
We were both young, and I nearly found you, young.
I could not find you. I prowled into my head,
The cold ghost of October that is my skull.
There's a god's plenty of lovers there,
The dead, the dying, and the beautiful.

What he finds inside himself is "That minor bird I hear from the great frost / My robin's song, the ancient nothingness," but the puns referring to Robert Frost's poem and then playing off of Edward Arlington Robinson's name and line, suggests a revitalization of the old, a new beginning, but a beginning based on utter humility and loss:"Now I know nothing, I can die alone," he ends the poem, describing the ultimate fate of the erotic lover.

Of course the erotic link to death can be more serious than mere physical death. Take the example of Dante's Inferno where the pilgrim-speaker meets Paolo and Francesca in Canto V, and calls to them. Dante the poet sets us up for Dante the speaker's failure by having him first envision the sinners in this part of Hell as starlings, then as the more attractive cranes, then as doves (signs of Christ!) as he gradually allows himself to be seduced by the sight of the famous adulterers, and then even more as Francesca speaks softly to him somehow above the din of the other ravaged souls. Egotistically, thinking Paolo and Francesca have answered the call of his poem, he stands amazed as they float over to him on literal flames of language. Francesa then tells their story that includes a beautiful lyric-- "Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende" ("Love which in gentle hearts is quickly born") which is based upon the repetition of the word "amor" in a pattern of similar constructions. Dante the pilgrim is so overcome by this language that he recreates it in his own, repeating the word "quando" ("when") in a similar pattern describing his own falling in love with love "when" he hears her words. Dante the epic poet, to be sure, is warning us against the immense power of language as a kind of Barthesian skin that his pilgrim succumbs to. Here the situation is not comic as in Ovid, or ironic as in Horace, or even melancholy as in Sappho, but potentially tragic for the erotic has led Dante the speaker beyond the physical to the ethical, from the worldly to the cosmic. His being seduced by the lovers' language leads to his being seduced by sin.

If the stakes are so high, if the process is so endless, if the end brings such pain, why bother? As Sappho says to Britomart in Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leuco , we might question how a lyric poet like Dante the speaker can accept a force that "turns you into desire, into shuddering desire that struggles over a body...like the foam between the rocks? And this body rejects you and crushes you, and you fall and long to embrace the rocks..." The answer lies in another of Pavese's dialogues where Eros and Thanatos argue over Apollo's killing of Hyacinth. For Apollo, Hyacinth is just a metaphor for beauty who simply dies when his function is over-- when the poem is over. But for Eros, it is all about "richness of feeling" for Hyacinth, he says, "knew perfect joy, he knew its rapid, bitter end." Indeed, the erotic joy could not be had without a deep understanding that it must end. This perhaps explains why Hesiod makes Eros the son of Night and death. And in other versions Eros was born of Aphrodite and Ares or "war" (Mars in Roman myth)
The erotics of poetry, if we are to believe Dante and Pavese, involve a seeking after what Charles Simic, playing off the medieval idea of the hart/deer hunt, calls the "marvelous prey." For the Slovene poet Tomaz Salamun the poem itself is a way to "seduce the reader" as well as the poet but creating the poem as a "hunt" for the "inexpressible"-- that silence we saw in Whitman and Horace-- an inexpressible desire he describes as a "beast in the woods the hunter always knows only by its tracks (its words). The very fact that we can't describe it adequately now, searching as we are with various metaphors and similes, shows what a powerful thing it is, what attraction it has." He also describes the process of writing a poem as an attempt to "pry open" the "sacred seed of everything, which is at the center of the fruit...then something strange can happen to you because you've gone so far, taken so many chances, you begin to rest, to come back down, and there's an indescribable joy at having lived in this orgasmic language. You feel like you've lost yourself."

In several poems Emily Dickinson creates through an erotic language a lover who is both nature and an imagined suitor. Number 656 (new system) begins as a simple trip to the shore, but quickly the way the sea and a house become intertwined so as to dislocate place, so that we understand that the poet is creating her own place in language, and more, she confuses her own identity with that of a house mouse itself dislocated and run aground:

I started early--Took my Dog--
And visited the Sea--
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me--

And Frigates -- in the Upper Floor
Extended hempen Hands--
Presuming Me to be a Mouse--
Aground --opon the Sands--

Dickinson then shifts the context again and reveals that what has been operating here is a confusion of place that leads to a confusion of roles and eventually to an erotic desire. It is this desire that starts to take over the poem as the imagined suitor begins to metaphorically fondle her in his guise as the sea:

But no Man moved Me-- till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe--
And past my Apron -- and my Belt
And past my boddice--too--

And made as He would eat me up --
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve--
And then -- I started--too

Now the poet is fully involved:taking a hint from her suitor her own erotic reaction begins to lead the way, and the scene is consummated:

And he --he followed-- close behind--
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle-- Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl --

Until we met the Solid Town--
No One He seemed to know--
And bowing -- with a Mighty look --
At me -- The sea withdrew--

As with Cavafy and Horace, the erotic scene ends, the beloved is no longer there, but here there is at least an imagined fulfillment as in Whitman; and as with Wordsworth and Horace, the scene gradually evolves from a seemingly innocent description of the natural world. The pauses and dashes themselves enact the hesitating movement until the two longer climactic segments, an action and reaction by the lover and beloved given as an echoing syntactic synchronization:"I felt His Silver Heel / Opon my Ancle -- Then My Shoes / Would overflow with Pearl --"

In Cesare Pavese's uncollected poem "Hard Labor" (not to be confused with the poem by that title in the book Hard Labor), Pavese describes how a woman and a man playfully flirt on the grass:

The two of them, stretched out on the grass, fully dressed, stare
At each other through the tender stalks:the woman tastes her hair
And then the grass. She smiles flirtatiously through the grass.
The man takes her slender hand and tastes it, pressing
His body against her. The woman rolls away from him.
This is how half the meadow has been pressed flat.
The girl, sitting up, teases her hair, and won't
Look at the man, eyes open, stretched out beside her.

Later, at supper, they stare at each other, hardly seeing the passersby who hardly notice them so much have they created their own world. But the source of the erotic for each of them is not in the actual other but in a created other. Here memory is of another kiss, another man-- yet the syntax of the poem clearly does not distinguish between the imagined and actual other men:

All day they chase each other and the woman flushes
From the sun. In her heart she feels gratitude for the man.
She remembers a furious kiss, exchanged in a forest,
Interrupted by the sounds of passersby, which still burns.
She clutches a bunch of grass curled up over a stone
In a grotto like beautiful maidenhair, and turns seductively
With eyes that could melt the man.

The man, for his part, is dreams of the hidden, the edge, what cannot be seen or had in the actual woman:

The man looks at the tangle
Of black stalks set among the tangle of green stalks,
And turns seductively as if to look at another tangle,
Which must be between her legs and under her bright dress,
But the woman ignores this. Not even his anger
Can move her, because the girl, who loves him, counters
Each assault of his kisses by taking his hand.

His reaction is to return home and create another woman to replace what he could not obtain, and the tone of the poem changes, becomes more intimate, for in a sense this is that loneliest of poets, Pavese himself speaking of his own experiences:

But later tonight, after leaving her, he knows where he'll go.
He'll return alone to his house, broken, and dazed,
But at least his satisfied body might be mended
By the sweetness of sleep in his deserted bed.
Only, and this is his revenge, he himself will imagine
The body of a woman which will be something like hers,
And will be, without shame, lustful, hers in fact.

Of course, it is precisely after such an experience that Pavese returned home to commit suicide-- Eros and Thanatos finally coming together in his life and art.

What Dickinson and Pavese are doing, what all these poets are doing, is using the notion of what Barthes calls the edge, the seam, a sense of a boundary that is threatened, often, as we have seen, a boundary between word and thing, imagination and actuality, physical and spiritual. Charles Simic provides a healthy comic view of this sort of transgression in his early poem "Breasts" which begins with such the sort of simple, almost innocent edge that Barthes describes as essential to the understanding of erotics, a sense that the thing itself stays hidden, in poetry, by language:

I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.

From there he goes on to compare them to "bestiaries of the ancients," to "Two ovens of the only / Philosopher's stone / Worth bothering about," all the while of course, conscious that it is the language creating these mythic breasts, this erotic mythos, for these breasts are also " Vowels of delicious clarity / For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths. And the poem keeps radiating out-- a sort of modern and ironically comic Song of Songs-- to create a world where breasts can be "Like two freshly poured beer mugs" and what gives "each finger / Its true shape." Towards the end he pronounces that

The old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

Simic's poem, of course, ends by a gesture where he "will tip each breast / Like a dark heavy grape" into his mouth, a Chaucerian act that comically proclaims the greatness of both the poet and his poem. If the erotics of poetry are to remain erotic there must be at least some sense of self consciousness either discovered in the poem or from the start, some sense of the boundaries that are threatened. The erotic exists in the threat imagination has on our reality, comic or not, and the threat reality has in turn on our imagination. It exists in the way words can threaten our comfortable visions:Tomaz Salamun's poem "Photograph with a Quote From Yazoo:Deep in each Other's Dream" threatens to cross several honored boundaries. The poem begins:

Christ is my sex object, therefore I am
not an ethical problem. I lead him to the meadows.
Like a little shepherd I force him to graze.

I root him out and clean his glands. Shall we
rinse ourselves under the tree?

The sudden shift to second person here is at least as jarring as the statements that precede it, and for a moment we are unsure whether he is addressing Christ or, as it turns out, the beloved. Later in the poem, it is clear that the beloved and Christ are metaphors for each other. The poem ends:

I am a little stone
falling into your flesh. I made you twitch
and tied you up. We crucified you.

What a powerful force this erotics of writing can be! The poet creates the other in order to long for her or him, and so in following this desire, in giving him or herself over to this hunt, loses him or herself, and negates the other. "What does this mean, I could wonder, for my own adaptations of Petrarch's poems, creating versions of his Laura in terms to reject my speaker, and allowing the speaker to lose himself in Petrarch's persona, however adapted to our own age? The erotics of writing aims at the negation of the self and the beloved, perhaps an extreme form of Keats' "chameleon poet," who is always "in for or filling some other body." The poet, then, is divided by his own language:he becomes the subject of the poem only by virtue of being in the field of the other who he created and who, if the classical model for the erotic holds, will eventually leave or reject him. Take for eample, Petrarch's Rime CLXVI:

THE CAVE

If I had stayed to strike the match ends of stars in poetry's cave
instead of trying to break the worst dark night over my knees,
you might have had your poet now, someone who'd weave
a blanket against the cold, who'd bury every grave inside a grave.
If I had stayed to echo each fist of smoke, to work the soul's lave
and shape a world you already knew by rote, to breathe each ready breeze,
I'd never know to cut the twisted vines from your heart's withered trees,
to spread my wings above your fire, or pull the dagger from the milky way.
Listen, the world beside this one cares little for us. It's an argument of stars.
Some say these crippled words are the smoke that abandons us for sky.
Don't listen. Even if it's only a light across the marsh, it can tell us we're alive.
I'll reap whatever I need from thistles and thorns with this broken scythe
of a poem, and, one hand filled with dirt, the other clearing away false stars,
I'll sow a world in every smile of yours that lately had become a scar.

The poet's self is defined entirely in terms of his words, and his words entirely in terms of their relationship to the beloved, and the implication is that this relationship only occurs upon the death of the speaker:he addresses his own language with instructions as to how they should behave after their death just , it is supposed, he will behave after his own death, rising to meet her. Indeed, the idea of the poet's death becomes the means of defining the poet's life. As Jacques Lacan says in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the writer will be like Acteon who stumbles upon the goddess, is punished by being changed into a stag, and is consumed by his own words which are the basis for erotic desire in the first place. or similarly--this is precisely what happens to Robert Frost's Narcissus-like character in "The Most of It" who calls out to the woods for some other to answer but only hears his own echo until one time what sounds back is the lumbering, animal, dangerous sound of something crashing towards him that both threatens his existence and excites his imagination. Indeed, the excitement depends upon the danger itself. Eros is perhaps directly proportional to the threat to the very existence of self who experiences it.

But this potential death of the self, the Thanatos side of the Erotic coin, can also be seen as we have shown, as a new beginning, a creation of a new self after the negation of the old self. Keats understood this when he had his lovers on his Grecian Urn "for ever piping songs for ever new" though he also understood that this was a static scene, a "Cold Pastoral." In his letter on the mansions of the mind, one passes, he says from the "infant or thoughtless chamber" to the erotic "Chamber of Maiden Thought" where we explore "dark passages" (his erotic metaphor here giving him away) to a third chamber of love and friendship. The same process seems to structure so many of his poems, and it suggests that for Keats the erotic hunt is a stage towards something more. Jane Hirshfield notes in an essay that "knowledge is erotic," and this is of course not only a Biblical idea but a Socratic idea as well. And Keatsian. For Keats, too, the language of the poem can substitute, by its intensity, for the absent belovedThe old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

Simic's poem, of course, ends by a gesture where he "will tip each breast / Like a dark heavy grape" into his mouth, a Chaucerian act td they both metamorphose into a spiritual existence. The erotics of the flesh become, as in Song of Songs, an erotics of the spirit. This is precisely what Dante describes in his La Vita Nuova where his attraction for Beatrice which started as such a physical sensation gradually becomes a spiritual one--indeed, early on in that book he describes a progression from natural to animal to vital spirits, and the woman who in the first sonnet has made a "captive" of his heart has led him in the last poem "Beyond the sphere that makes the widest round." And it's related to a notion that Kierkegaard refers to in "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic" where desire moves from mere dreaminess to an active seeking to an understanding of desire as absolute love. And it's a notion that Ficino and Pico Mirandella referred to in the Renaissance when they talked about how language can "penetrate the realm of eternal beauty and truth."

The origin of this idea is probably in Sappho who begins one poem with the phrase, "Here is success for your tongue, my children / the poems of the bare-breasted Muses," with its obvious pun on tongue as a reference to language and to erotic touch, only to realize in the end that what she ultimately desires is "refinement, beauty, and light." In The Phaedrus Socrates describes how the Muses posses the poet producing a sort of trance so that his soul can be led by Eros from physical to spiritual beauty.

Once he has received the emanation of beauty through his eyes, he grows warm, and through the perspiration that ensues, he irrigates the sprouting of his wing. When he is quite warm, the outer layers of the seedling unfurl -- parts which by reason of their close-drawn rigidity had for a long time prevented anything from blossoming. As nourishment streams upon it the stump of the wing begins to swell and grow from the root upward as a support for the entire structure of the soul, fully developing the wing which every soul possessed in the past.

Besides the stunning eroticism of the passage itself, there is the clear idea that the lover, who Socrates' mentor, Diotima, equates with the poet, in moving from the physical towards the spiritual, does not abandon the physical and sexual but is rather enjoys a sensual existence enriched by the spiritual. This is precisely Blake's idea in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell -- the transcendent vision will come to pass "by an increase in sensual enjoyment" he says in his Notebooks. The essence of Eros is desire, what takes us from where we are to where we might be, from the present to the eternal, from ignorance to knowledge, self to other, community to cosmos. It is what moves the words from the beginning to the end of the line only to find a new beginning in the next line, the next poem, and it is what moves us from the beginning to the end of the poem, from the external poem to what Yeats called "the deep heart's core." It is the power of language to transform and move us, to transport us (the original meaning of the word metaphor). Miguel de Unamuno, the great Spanish poet and philosopher writes that "Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own consciousness makes us discover in the endeavors and movements and revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve and increase consciousness, to which everything tends." Ultimately, poetry is a search for the divine, the immortal. The great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, writes in The Double Flame :"eroticism is first and foemost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally, what always evades us, what is always beyond, but what is always there-- the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.