Poems for April 1 End Notes

Poems for April 1 End Notes
Be warned: Herein lies gay stuff,
some of it more graphic than you’d
like your boss to read over your shoulder.
Queer poetry is old. Around 2500 B.C.E., a Sumerian poet wrote “The Epic of
Gilgamesh.” It’s the oldest surviving epic poem ⎯ and the oldest surviving homoerotic love
story. Go figure.
Luckily for us, writers since then have written more briefly. There will be no epics
for End Notes. These selections are sorted chronologically rather than topically so we can
speculate about evolution. Enjoy.
Sappho was born around 630 B.C.E. She lived on the Greek isle of Lesbos, from which the
word “lesbian” derives. This poem was translated by Mary Barnard.
I have not had one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
Ω
“I have not had one word from her”
a great deal; she said to me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
"all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 1 of 7

"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song...”
Gaius Valerius Catullus lived from 84 to 54 B.C.E. His dad was friends with Julius Caesar.
Catullus is most known for his poems of love and hate about a married woman he had an
affair with, but four of his love poems are directed to a young man. This one is the only
one that isn’t bitter, angry or jealous. If you’re interested, read them all (24, 48, 81 and
99) here: http://catullus.iscool.net.
Ω
48
Juventius, if I could play at kissing
your honeyed eyes as often as I wished to,
300,000 games would not exhaust me;
never could I be satisfied or sated,
although the total of our osculations
were greater than the ears of grain at harvest.
Ω
Walt Whitman would scoff at people who praised him, but that hasn’t kept generations of
readers from doing so. He lived from 1819 to 1892, mostly in New York. One biographer
called Whitman a “God-intoxicated poet”; his poems are inseparably spiritual and sensual.
Most surveys of American literature cover Whitman, but they use chaste poems about the
death of Abraham Lincoln: “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d.” Whitman is generally believed to have been bisexual or gay.
Excerpt from “I Sing the Body Electric”
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
1
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 2 of 7

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body
were not the soul, what is the soul?
The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.
The expression of the face balks account,
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not
hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.
The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress,
their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,
The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent
green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and from the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horse-man in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives
waiting,
The female soothing a child, the farmer's daughter in the garden or cow-yard,
The young fellow hosing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, nativeborn,
out on the vacant lot at sundown after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through cleansetting
trowsers and waist-straps,
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the
listening on the alert,
The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd neck and the counting;
Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's breast with the little
child,
Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and
pause, listen, count.
2
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 3 of 7

“Whoever You are, Holding Me now in Hand,”
from the 1900 edition of “Leaves of Grass”
Whoever you are, holding me now in hand,
Without one thing, all will be useless,
I give you fair warning, before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.
Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?
The way is suspicious—the result uncertain, perhaps destructive;
You would have to give up all else—I alone would expect to be your God, sole and
exclusive,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life, and all conformity to the lives around you, would have
to be abandon’d;
Therefore release me now, before troubling yourself any further—Let go your hand from my
shoulders,
Put me down, and depart on your way.
Or else, by stealth, in some wood, for trial,
Or back of a rock, in the open air,
(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not—nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill—first watching lest any person, for miles around,
approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea, or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss, or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus, merely touching you, is enough—is best,
And thus, touching you, would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
But these leaves conning, you con at peril,
For these leaves, and me, you will not understand,
They will elude you at first, and still more afterward—I will certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 4 of 7

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me, and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love, (unless at most a very few,) prove victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only—they will do just as much evil, perhaps more;
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit—that which I
hinted at;
Therefore release me, and depart on your way.
Emily Dickinson was mysterious even to her neighbors, and little has been revealed about
her since her death. Some of her poems have a tinge of same-sex lovin’, and we can read
into that what we will. She was born in Amherst, Mass., in 1830 and died there in 1886.
Her breast is fit for pearls,
But I was not a 'Diver' -
Her brow is fit for thrones
But I have not a crest.
Her heart is fit for home-
I - a Sparrow - build there
Sweet of twigs and twine
My perennial nest.
Now I knew I lost her -
Not that she was gone-
But Remoteness traveled
On her Face and Tongue.
Alien, though adjoining
As a Foreign Race
Traversed she though pausing
Latitudeless Place
Elements Unaltered
Universe the same
But Love's transmigration
Somehow this had come
Ω
1
7
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 5 of 7

Henceforth to remember
Nature took the Day
I had paid so much for-
His is Penury
Not who toils for Freedom
Or for Family
But the Restitution
Of Idolatry.
To see her is a Picture
To hear her is a Tune
To know her an Intemperance
As innocent as June
To know her not - Affliction -
To own her for a Friend
A warmth as near as if the Sun
Were shining in your Hand.
Pierre Louys’ book “Chansons de Bilitis” was at first shunned for its lesbian content.
Unsurprisingly, though, lesbians embraced it. That’s how it came to be that some of the
most-famous lesbian poems were written by a man. Louys lived from 1870 to 1925. This is
an anonymous translation.
9
Ω
Penumbra
Under the sheet of transparent wool we
slipped, she and I. Even our heads were sunk
under, and the lamp illumined the stuff over
us. Thus I beheld her dear body in a mysterious
light. We were closer one to another, more
free, more intimate, more naked. 'In the same
shirt,' she said. We remained with our hair up
in order to be less covered, and the perfumes
of the two women rose from their two natural
censers in the bed's narrow space. Nothing in
the world, not even the lamp, saw us that night.
Which of us was lover only she and I could tell.
But men shall know nothing thereof.
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 6 of 7

Amy Lowell was nearly forgotten, but modern readers mining for gender and sexuality in
poetry rediscovered her. Her book, “What's O'Clock,” earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1926. She
lived from 1874 to 1925.
Ω
“Decade”
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
Ω
Edna St. Vincent Millay was among the earliest outspoken American bisexuals. She was
born in Maine in 1892 and died in 1950. The book from which this poem is taken earned her
instant fame, and in 1923 she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for another collection.
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine
“Witch-Wife,” from “Renascence”
Ω
That Gay Group! – Spring 2004
www.wichita.edu/tgg “End Notes” – Reading Club – April Page 7 of 7