The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 20. ...then add two lovely boys...

Many of Wilmot's poems are boastful and glib about sex with women, which are always cold and emotionless. These two poems, along with a very few others on same-sex love, are sober and serious. He treated the love among equals as something very special; holy, might be a better word.

The first of these is delightful, erotic, and, as you say, treats same-sex love quite seriously. Your point about glib reference to sex with women leaps off the last line of the second poem. You will send me scurrying to find more of this poet. 

On 10/13/2021 at 2:08 PM, Parker Owens said:

The first of these is delightful, erotic, and, as you say, treats same-sex love quite seriously. Your point about glib reference to sex with women leaps off the last line of the second poem. You will send me scurrying to find more of this poet. 

Thank you, Parker. I keep thinking of his generation having to pick up the pieces of his broken country after their civil war. It seems -- like say, the 1920s -- there's a need to unwind and not take the world so sincerely, since hypocrisy, regardless of place or time, is evergreen. So it is very interesting to see the poet be so unafraid to mention things that in theory should have meant his death. Perhaps no one took his written antics as true-to-life in his times, but which the 18th century reveled in as if gospel. Funny, I think Juvenal and Hemingway fall into this same billing of tall-tale tellers regarded as oracles of  history later on. 

Thanks again for reading all of these postings        

I feel I should mention that David Vieth's staid 1960 edition of Wilmot's Complete Poems (p.26, in the 1968 edition) mentions "Let's practice, then, and we shall prove/These are the only sweets of love" seems to bear a direct inspiration from Marlowe's immortal lines "Come live with me and be my love/And we will all the pleasures prove." But this is further proof of Wilmot's intent that this poem be read as coming from a man to a man, as Marlowe's "Alexis and Corydon" was (and still is) the most famous same-sex love poem of the entire English Renaissance -- something evidently Vieth did not feel comfortable reminding his readers