Poetry Can Pull Down The Bloody Moon

After much searching, I finally procured a modern and fairly complete copy of Ovid’s Erotic Poems, a collection including a number of poetic books he conceived independently, but now conveniently amassed together. And what a find!

Ovid is one of the great Roman poets, better known for his epic masterpiece The Metamorphoses, which (outside of Homer’s Odyssey) is likely the most influential piece of literature in the Western world. Dante read it, Shakespeare stole from it (copiously), ditto Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales. Modern writers from Salman Rushdie to Italo Calvino have cited its influence, and all for good reason. Ovid was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and Metamorphoses is a work which rings true for each new generation, as its theme of continual change is always current. (For those looking for a good copy of The Metamorphoses, I’d suggest the Charles Martin translation).

I wouldn’t attempt to defend my spotty morals, or whitewash

My flaws with aggressive lies.

However, Ovid made his bones first writing elegiac poetry and forming his reputation as a lascivious bad boy by courting the married women of Rome. Ovid lived at the turn of the tide in Roman history, just after the assassination of Julius Caesar and the rise of Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first Emperor. Unfortunately for Ovid, the new Emperor had quite a stick up his ass, and his newly decreed (and heavily enforced) morality laws put a true crimp in Ovid’s style (he was eventually banished from Rome and sent to small town on the shore of the Black Sea…presumably for the publication of his work The Art of Love, a poetic manual for how to seduce married women).

Yesterday afternoon, while strolling down that cloister

Where all the Danaid statues are on display

I saw her. Love at first sight. I dashed off a note – with

Suggestions –

And got the nervous answer: It’s not allowed.

Why not? I wrote back.

Ovid is truly the first poster boy for cultivating a Bad Boy Image, well-knowing that even a bad reputation gets you farther than no reputation at all. However, it is a great mistake to imagine that Ovid was merely a Roman-era Player, or to write off his erotic poetry as the dirty literature of a fevered mind.

Every lover’s on active service, my friend, active service,

Believe me,

And Cupid has his headquarters in the field.

First, Ovid’s poems are almost never erotically explicit. His stance throughout seems to be that everyone knows what happens between the sheets, he doesn’t need to spell it out. Instead, his poetry focuses on the before and after, the wooing and the scorning, the chase and the breakup, and constantly his personal battles with his own conscience, failings, and the psychology of love.

Further is Ovid’s deft, hilarious wit. He is at once self-deprecating and outrageously confident, both moods eliciting chuckles at his absurdity. But his humor springs out precisely from his outrageousness, as he bluntly writes poems to his mistress’s servant, begging the servant to look the other way and let him get to his mistress, as he opines to the gods that he intended to write epic, Homeric poems, but discovered that they had no effect on young ladies and thus he turned to elegies, which allowed him to bed more beauties, as he rages against the dawning sun, telling it to leave him and his mistress be and let them sleep after a long night of lovemaking, calling Aurora a “dirty misogynist” for getting young girls up so early.

Written to his personal writing block after his mistress has rejected his love poems:

Cheap useless object – I’ll dump you at some crossing

For a laden wagon to splinter with its wheels!

The craftsman who fashioned you from untrimmed timber—

I’ll swear he had guilty hands. The tree itself

Must have been used as a gibbet, then turned into crosses

For some executioner.

It is his bluntness and directness which zings you, bringing forth bursts of laughter over and over. And his directness hasn’t lessened even nearly 2000 years later. He is unbelievably easy to read. For those wary about reading poetry, I would offer Ovid, who brings no immediate challenge. He is clever, funny, and a breeze. The only hang-up would be the references to Greek and Roman mythology, which are rare and not critical to understanding what he means.

After spending half the night begging the doorman to open up and let him slip into his mistress’s home:

Still obstinate? Or asleep? God damn you, have my

Entreaties

Been wasted on empty air?

The only poet I like as much who is as easy to read would be Fernando Pessoa, another poet who writes with brief simplicity.

For anyone interested, pick up the Peter Green translation of The Erotic Poems. It is a Penguin Classic edition.

As for myself, I’m utterly convinced. From here on out, I’m a devout Ovidian.