"In a loose robe of tinsel forth she came,/Nothing but it betwixt her nakedness/And envious light"

[larryhammer]

Something that got cut in the final round from the new hundred poems project. Not because it's not good, but because I already had Hero and Leander and Orchestra and didn't have "The Fairies Farewell."

Ovid's Banquest of Sense* (text starts here) by George Chapman is a very odd duck. It is, essentially an Elizabethan Ovid/Julia the Elder Historical RPF in verse. What's odder than all that, however, is that is both highly sensuous, dealing with a seduction organized by treating each of the canonical five senses in turn, and strongly metaphysical, with passages that but for the meter could almost have been written by Donne. It is also highly erotic, though the story breaks off before the seduction is consummated (darn it).

All of which ought to clearly make it an Ovidian erotic narrative. But it does not fit well among others of the genre, most notably because it's Ovidian by being about Ovid rather than imitating him. It is also strikingly more original than most, Hero and Leander being its best rival in that regard.

I do wish it were better known.


* Don't be put off by the title -- in modern idiom, it would be "banquet of the senses." The Elizabethan orthography of the only text I can find online is, however, understandably rebarbative.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

the text wasn't as odd as the format, and how many clicks it took to find the poem. Lovely! But I don't think as brilliant as Donne

[larryhammer]

Whoops -- I've added a navigation aid.

No, not as brilliant as Donne at his compactest best. But comparable to anything Donne wrote at length, I think. As I said, and odd duck.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Tinsel would make for an itchy robe. And you know that little strands of it are going to get stuck in places.

[larryhammer]

You know perfectly well that tinsel originally meant cloth with metal threads woven in or decorated with spangles.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, come on, dude, you know perfectly well that if you showed George Chapman, or Ovid for that matter, Dita von Teese dressed like a Christmas tree with fewer ornaments and no lights, he'd forget what he was doing and say, "Yes, that's just what I'm thinking of. For the next three weeks."

Any man who writes a poem featuring a pair of giant breasts with flashing lights on top, in the 17c, is obviously ahead of his time.

What? It's right here:

Behind theyr Mother two Pyramides
Of freckled Marble, through the Arbor viewed,
On whose sharp brows, Sol, and Tytanides
In purple and transparent glasse were hewed,
Through which the Sun-beames on the statues staying,
Made theyr pale bosoms seeme with blood imbrewed,
Those two sterne Plannets rigors still bewraying
To these dead forms, came liuing beauties essence
Able to make them startle with her presence.

(Freckles, even. That's so cute of him.)

[larryhammer]

True, true, about actual tinsel.

The whole poem has lush bits to boggle at, if you look closely. There's more further on, in the scent section that still has me scratching my head.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

It would make a great conceptual script as a masque or floor show for a stag party. The Vegas style is all there if you look.



See how heroically I refrain from a sniff-and scratch-your-head joke! See!

[larryhammer]

Heh.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

And as to that, Lurex is itchy too...

[rymrytr.livejournal.com]

And here I thought all this time that Ovid was just a town in Colorado.

Learn something every day (though sometimes it's got to be pounded into my head like dry sand into a rat hole, in the Oklahoma Panhandle…).

[larryhammer]

Many of the pioneers had a classical education. Thus all those Ciceros and Caesars littering the Rockies.

---L.