Mental sets are essential to every art, and various cheap jokes can be made of them. Here is one such which Sir John Suckling, who was capable of better, should never have composed:
There is a thing which in the light
Is seldom us’d; but in the night
It serves the female maiden crew,
The ladies and the good-wives too;
They used to take it in their hand,
And then it will uprightly stand;
And to a hole they it apply,
Where by its goodwill it would die;
It spends, goes out, and still within
It leaves its moisture thick and thin.
There have been many riddles of this kind, although, led to expect that the answer to the question, ‘What is it?’ will be ‘penis,’ and being told with a triumphant smirk that it is ‘candle’ instead, we may with some annoyance put that dubious object back into the poem to function as a dildo rather than a light.
The purest tale can still be blue, given a big blue eye, as that crafty old pornographer, Samuel Richardson, demonstrated more than once; for instance, when he wrote Pamela, the edifying history of a prick tease — a book bluer than any movie.
• • •
Aching puberty indeed. The awkward figure in that snapshot I referred to earlier was the first completely naked woman I had ever seen, and her very awkwardness, the cheapness of the camera, the amateurishness of print, pose, and light, the commonplace reality of the trailer, made her bewildered breasts and puffy pubic hair yearningly real too, as if the photograph were a doorway or a window opening toward a nudity so ordinary it might have been anyone’s — mine — yours — yes, in just that way it was a window, became a door, and although I felt sorry for the girl and even shared her humiliation, I stared — ashamed of my own heat — her helplessness as exciting as her sex — I stared — I lapped her up, left the picture-paper clean as a cat’s saucer; because finally, when one day I looked, she was no longer there, not even the weed caused any commotion. The window had pulled its own shade. So like a sultan I soon gave her away since she was once again only a fifty-cent image, an eyeful at the boy-pull and occasion for a furtive jerk.
Yet what had I seen when I stared? She was so girlish and so naked, so simply there, that a description of her, had I attempted it, would have failed for want of attention. Too real to be pornographic, I saw not the forbidden image but the forbidden object of that image, the great mystery itself, the subject of a thousand dreams, a hundred thousand stories. I saw what all my organs seemed to stir for… and I took fright. Were her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, then? were they a pair of maiden worlds unconquered? Of course not, but I would have wanted to think so. Fuddle-eyed innocence can only say, Gee Whiz. And the knowing writer — whose carnal knowledge begins with Gee Whiz and ends at Ho Hum without apparently stopping at any station in between — hunts among his comparisons like Wilde through his wardrobe for something he may have handy of a suitably similar color, size, softness, and value.
Perhaps mounds of ice cream topped by a cherry? slopes of virginal snow, alabaster idols, golden apples, hills and hum-mocks, berries? ah, of course, a plump pair of pillows.
The singer of the Song of Solomon declares that the breasts of his beloved are two graceful young roes, that they are clusters of grapes, that they are towers; but I am not prepared to believe this crook-carrying poet, whose mind is exclusively on money, food, drink, and the increase of his herds.
1 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.
2 Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.
3 Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks.
4 Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.
5 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
These comparisons are always unfairly one-sided and often reveal, as in the singer above, an unpleasant preference for perfume, property, and plunder. One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principle, gum bubble, mole, or birth wart, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.
There’s something of the thimble to them (not enough), and they are frequently described as rosy or said to possess the color of young shoots, but why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident and audible and yields such frigid results? Perhaps they are like the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers. Yes. When brown, they are another pair of eyes. Or is it the eyes which promise me those rich wide aureoles? I have seen nipples so pulled on and flattened by nursing, they hung there like two tiny tongues.
D’Annunzio may write that ‘long trailing vapours slid through the cypresses of the Monte Maria like waving locks through a comb of bronze,’ and though the comparison is highly decorative, it is not absurd to imagine on the obverse of the metal a maiden’s blond tresses, as she prepares her hair for a night of love, passing through the tines of her comb of bronze like trailing vapours through a row of cypresses. But may I comfortably think of those sheep as wandering teeth?
There’s no tit for tat in this poetry, which is, after all, the sort of erotic verse preferred by those who once loved to listen (and if they could, would still, sweet dears) to Madame Melba, freshly risen from her death as Mimi and now surrounded by bouquets, while accompanying herself on a baby grand wheeled opportunely from the wings to the center of an emptied stage, warble ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in the intervals of silence between applauding palms.
Oh! ah! ai! alack and alas! ahimè! but what is love? how best speak of the beauty of women? account for the soul’s deep swoons without confusing them with the greedy swoops of a gull after herring? explain the blue of serge or chicory, or ordinary sky, the iris and the pansy blue of melancholy, the still intenser blue of the imagination?
It is Orlando’s problem too, and Orlando finds that every subject he (and he will not suffer his sex change until the eighteenth century) wishes to pursue so embroiled, cluttered, and betangled with every other that it appears impossible for him to say a single, simple, clear, true thing.
… he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. ‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.’ And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.