82. Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry

This post was first submitted to the Ohio University student newspaper in response to their sex column.

Editor, The Post:

Your BedPost column (23 September) about how couples, or maybe threesomes or foursomes, can enjoy sex while the woman is menstruating made me think of the enjoyment of sex in the literature I used to teach, Renaissance poetry. Here's John Donne addressing his mistress "On Going to Bed":

License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land...

She's a new continent. Oh the wonder of it. Here's Thomas Lodge's idea of the feelings of a responding woman:

Love in my bosom like a bee

Doth suck his sweet:

Now with his wings he plays with me

Now with his feet.

"Love" is Eros, more familiarly Cupid. His best spokesman is Robert Herrick. If he gave advice in a column he'd tell you what to concentrate on:

Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white?
Or else a cherry, double graced,
Within a lily centre placed?
Or ever marked the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drowned in cream?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.

And there were others. Their note was joy and the requirement in hitting it was imagination. So many of them hit it so well that England was called "a nest of singing birds." Joy! Joy! Joy!

Come away, come sweet love,

The golden morning breaks.

All the earth, all the air

Of love and pleasure speaks

The advice common to both your contributors ("throw down a towel" to protect the sheets) comes from Cosmopolitan Magazine.. That magazine, with Playboy, has spoken so matter-of-factly and so long of such things that you might think its tradition — that of sex science, going back to Alfred Kinsey — is the only one. The Renaissance love poets remind us that it's not.

It's possible that the Cosmopolitan tradition will crowd the Renaissance (to which some add Romantic) tradition of lovemaking so far out of our consciousness that it will never — despite the efforts of every literature teacher I know — make its way back into popular culture. What I have seen, or think I have seen, among Americans, or at least college-age Americans, since Kinsey's time makes me think so: a progressive coarsening of the erotic imagination.

Is that so bad? How will you be able to tell? If sex science has flattened your imagination, if it makes no difference to you that Eros has become an orgasm manager, you won't. You'll throw down your towels with no idea of what you're missing.