284. A New Yorker Cartoon, Our Time, and Past Literature

In the cartoon (New Yorker, 3-9-15) a man lies face down on a bed with his head buried in a pillow.  The woman sitting next to him says, "Snap of it, Ray — it's just sex."  Taking the woman to be speaking for our time I couldn't help recalling (and looking up)  these passages from earlier times:

[...] suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

 — Robert Jordan and Maria making love in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored,

Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust,

And deep into her crystal body poured

The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust:

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, of Endymion making love to Selene, Sonnet LII

Then Julia let me woo thee,

Thus, thus to come unto me;

         And when I shall meet

         Thy silv'ry feet,

My soul I'll pour into thee.

— Robert Herrick, "Night Piece, to Julia"

Rowing in Eden —

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor  Tonight —

In Thee!

— Emily Dickinson, "Wild Nights — Wild Nights!"

When my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world.

— William Butler Yeats, "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty."

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,

My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

— John Donne, "To His Mistress, G0ing to Bed"

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache

of longing mounted and he wept at last,

his dear wife,  clear and faithful, in his arms,

longed for

as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer

spent in rough water where his ship went down...

in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:

and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,

her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
— the returned Odysseus and Penelope reunited in their wedding bed, Homer, Odyssey