Thomas Campbell has not written many purely erotic poems—he prefers the shorter or longer love-story in verse to the personal outburst—but some of the few are as tender in tone as Moore's or Keats's. And, strange to say, he becomes warmer, tenderer, less restrained in expression as time passes. It is as an old man that he writes his most amatory verse. To the remonstrance of conscience, that Platonic friendship should content him at his years, he answers by a challenge to Plato himself in the skies to look into the eyes of a certain lady "and try to be Platonic."
He sings of the transient nature of love, of the suffering occasioned by the absence of the beloved; he puts into words the sufferings of the maid whose lover is "never wedding, ever wooing." But he is most characteristically himself as the erotic poet when he confesses, with a half mournful smile, that his heart is younger than his years, as in the following verses:—
"The god left my heart, at its surly reflections,
But came back on pretext of some sweet recollections,
And he made me forget what I ought to remember,
That the rose-bud of June cannot bloom in November.
Ah! Tom, 'tis all o'er with thy gay days—
Write psalms, and not songs for the ladies.
But time's been so far from my wisdom enriching,
That the longer I live, beauty seems more bewitching;
And the only new lore my experience traces,
Is to find fresh enchantment in magical faces.
How weary is wisdom, how weary!
When one sits by a smiling young dearie!"
Keats's erotic verse is, as was to be expected, burning, breathless, sensual; it revels in fragrance and sweet sounds. Read this masterly verse:—
"Lift the latch! ah gently! ah tenderly—sweet!
We are dead if that latchet gives one little clink!
Well done—now those lips, and a flowery seat—
The old man may sleep, and the planets may wink;
The shut rose shall dream of our loves, and awake
Full blown, and such warmth for the morning's take;
The stock-dove shall hatch her soft brace and shall coo,
While I kiss to the melody, aching all through."
Shelley's love-poetry is at one and the same time hyper-spiritual and meltingly sensuous. We are reminded by it of Correggio. In the productions of both these artists the expression of the most utter self-surrender is blent with the expression of the most violent sensual excitement; what Shelley describes is the erotic death-struggle. Take the concluding verse of the The Indian Serenade:—
"Oh lift me from the grass!
I die, I faint, I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh! press it to thine own again
Where it will break at last."
And along with it the transport with which Epipsychidion concludes:—
"Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning Sun.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!"
If Byron's domain is that of the tortures of the luckless or forsaken lover, Shelley's is, as we see, that of the pain of the happy lover, of self-annihilation in the rapture of love. But for the very reason that the erotic domain of both these great poets was thus definitely limited, neither of them wrote many erotic poems; to neither was this one of the most important fields of his productivity.