Two Erotic Poems

Here are two excellent poems, of different eras and origins, that are at heart surprisingly similar. The first, "Politics," written in the pre-World War 30s, is by W. B. Yeats.

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here's a traveled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there's a politician

That has read and thought.

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

This lovely verse restates a perennial literary theme: the conflict between public and personal, or, between the life of duty and the life of pleasure. The speaker of the poem, whoever he is, withdraws from a troubling weary political conversation into a succinctly limned but very concrete and nostalgic sexual fantasy. The anxieties heaped up in the first ten lines are overpowered by the buoyancy of the concluding two. The hinge of the poem is the daring "But O" -- "O" being the most dangerous syllable in poetry, which, when wrongly used, can be a sentimental disaster, but when discreetly employed, as here, condenses into one moan an outburst of genuine feeling that overwhelms a stultifying social ritual. For a pleasing moment, the speaker, powered by that great "O," withdraws from politics to enjoy, at least in his imagination, the pleasures and consolations of sex.  I 

Here's another poem -- a song, actually -- quoted first in sixteenth-century manuscript version and then modernized.

Westron wynde when wyll thow blow

     The smalle rayne down can rain

Cryst if my love were in my Armys

     And I in my bed Agayne.

(And now the modernized version.)

Western wind, when wilt thou blow

     The small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

     And I in my bed again.

In this anonymous quatrain, it's not politics but the cruel world itself that is so discomforting. It's winter, and the singer waits for the western wind that is the harbinger of spring. "Small rain" is not an idiom that is still in use;  nowadays we say "light rain" -- the meaning is something like "April showers."  In the traditional world that we have lost, "small rain" might even have had just a touch of biblical resonance: "as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." The "small rain," when it will at last come, will bring an end to harsh sterile winter and signal the start of fertile spring. To paraphrase the first two lines: "when will the western wind bring in the showers that will cause the earth once more to bloom?"  And then the hinge expletive "Christ" (paralleling Yeats's 'O' but shockingly blasphemous) which precipitates a potent sexual fantasy: in his warm, no longer wet wintry bed, the speaker can shower sex upon his beloved.

Four exquisite, unmatchable lines of erotic poetry that are, miraculously, even more spare and resonant than Yeats's.

Comments

[M]

the KJV translation you cite postdates the poem Westron Wynde, so it doesn't have biblical resonance—the opposite is perhaps true