Sexy Valentine's Poems

Yes, I know Val's Day was yesterday, but so what? I was reading a bit on Slate about some sexy poems (find them at: http://www.slate.com/id/2159730/fr/flyout)) and thought to share them here. I love the idea that no matter the time period, people were celebrating the ideas and thoughts of love, sex, lust, and desire.


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The word expense means, literally, a pushing out or an ejaculating, and some scholars read that meaning, along with the old meaning of spirit as a synonym for semen, in this sonnet by William Shakespeare. Could Frost, when he wrote his sonnet "Putting in the Seed," have had this predecessor in mind? Shakespeare ends his poem with two lines that make suitable last words for this anthology:

THE EXPENSE OF SPIRIT

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
Laid on purpose to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
...All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
...To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

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There's nothing implicit or mysterious about Robert Herrick's 17th-century poem about a nighttime erection and wet dream:

THE VINE

I dream'd this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embrac'd:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem'd to me
Young Bacchus ravisht by his tree.
My curles about her neck did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy'd,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock, than like a Vine.