10-14-2013, 01:52 PM
What intrigues me most about this poem, after a few readings through, is the kind of nostalgia it portrays. This seems to me in direct opposition to a "good and faithful" nostalgia for an Edenic time-prior-to-time. It rather comes off as a pining for what came immediately after the Fall: humanity, mortality, the sacrament of embodiment, of gustatory and sensual pleasures, of all manner of human wretchedness and brokenness. There is a certain anti-Platonism, a valorization of the inescapable imperfections of real existence, a celebration of deviance, death and despair.
And yet, it is not so simple as that.
"To dead chivalry . . ." seems terribly out of place. To reincorporate it, it helps to look at what comes right afterwards: "Sappho's ghost." Does this posit some sort of paradoxical identity between the idealizing, banal prosody of heterosexual courtly love, and the delicate, immortal poetry of female homosexuality? However ridiculous the Quixotan male courtesan looks to the practical, egotistically-ethical modern sensibility, his erotomania has some affinity, the poem seems to be saying, with the spirit of the most celebrated and ancient dead lesbian poet. Perhaps the idea is just this: it can be liberating and strangely healthy to permit desire to conquer its own normative and provincial prohibitions.
And yet, it is not so simple as that.
"To dead chivalry . . ." seems terribly out of place. To reincorporate it, it helps to look at what comes right afterwards: "Sappho's ghost." Does this posit some sort of paradoxical identity between the idealizing, banal prosody of heterosexual courtly love, and the delicate, immortal poetry of female homosexuality? However ridiculous the Quixotan male courtesan looks to the practical, egotistically-ethical modern sensibility, his erotomania has some affinity, the poem seems to be saying, with the spirit of the most celebrated and ancient dead lesbian poet. Perhaps the idea is just this: it can be liberating and strangely healthy to permit desire to conquer its own normative and provincial prohibitions.