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Friday, May 12, 2006
Byron’s Vagina
The title is one of a series of pieces I’d like to write, should time and leisure permit, about the Romantics; others include ‘Wordsworth’s Tattoo’ and ‘Coleridge’s Lobster’. But ‘Byron’s Vagina’ has a certain ring to it, don’t you think? Of all the Romantics, and indeed of all English poets, he’s surely the one whose posthumous reputation has gnarled up his work the most with transgressive erotics. More, I’m not sure it’s possible fully to love Byron’s poetry unless you at least partially commit to the sumptuously-inane sentimental-tragic erotics of the Byron mythos. Here’s an example:
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
This is famous enough, and lucid enough (and lovely enough) not to need a great deal of glossing; except perhaps to remind those not up on their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slang, that a ‘rover’ meant a sexually promiscuous male (what the OED rather primly calls ‘an inconstant lover, a male flirt’). But that’s not a gloss that is needful, really. The poem retains its power as a sadly beautiful lyric of love-weariness precisely because its symbolism (the sword outwearing its sheath) is so patently sexual.
Byron wrote this in Venice in 1817. A letter written to his pal Thomas Moore (in which this poem first appears) describes his time at the Venetian Carnival in nicely gloomy manner: “though I did not dissipate much upon the whole,” he told his friend, “yet I find ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard,’ though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.” So far from being the Heathcliffean semi-devil of the nineteenth-century popular imagination, this seems to me to paint Byron in a rather sweetly bathetic light. In effect he’s saying ‘I’m shagging as much as ever I did, but you know what? It no longer seems to be the earth-shattering and profound business it once was. I’m even, whisper-it, starting to get a bit bored with it. This must mean I’m nearly dead.’ And thus it is that one example of the male of the species begins his belated movement from adolescence into middle-age.
But I’ve gotten into trouble before for seeming to condescend to great writers, so I’ll stop that and instead concentrate on the poem’s core image. ‘For the sword outwears its sheath,’ Byron tells us (or as he puts it in his letter to Moore ‘the sword wears out the scabbard’); words uttered with the air of one who has knows all about the chafeing and raw experience of which he speaks.
If the sexual overtone of this image were not clear enough, we might pause on the Latin word vagina. This is what Lewis and Short have to say about this interesting word:
vagina, ae, f., a scabbard, sheath. I Lit. of a sword [… 15 citations by way of example follow …] II Transf. the covering, sheath, holder of any thing. 1 In general [two citations]; 2 The sheath of an ear of grain etc. The hull, husk [three citations follow]. 3 The female vagina [only one citation needed for this last one].
Thus might a Roman centurion demonstrate the proper use of his vagina without any of his men sniggering. Now the obvious point which occurs here is the old and depressing one, that the word for this part of the female body carries within it an almost literally phallocentric bias, as if it were defined only as a sort of covering or occasional resting place for the male member. I don’t know many women in my circle of acquaintance who’d be too happy with that definition.
Following on from that insight might come the obvious feminist deconstruction of Byron’s poem. The middle stanza characterises the (male phallic) sword outwearing the (female, vaginal) sheath, which clearly implies that men are hard, durable, metallic, and women are soft, perishable, cloth-like; but which also – by paralleling the sword and the soul, the sheath and the body – tends to valorize the Sublime male as an eternal spiritual principle, and to denigrate the Beautiful female as ancillary, corporeal, secondary. Who would doubt that the ‘we’ invoked in the first and last stanzas names an exclusively male collective identity? Why else do women have these vaginae (the implied and masculine speaker of the poem seems to be saying) if not to service the glorious godlike cock of an individual such as myself? And thus do I ensure that google searches on both ‘Byron + Lewis and Short’ and ‘glorious godlike cock’ will lead interested parties directly to the Valve.
Of course, the poem acts as a renunciation of the roving lifestyle, one that equates giving up sleeping-around with shuffling off the mortal coil altogether. ‘The heart must pause to breathe,’ (‘how pooped I am!’) after all, and although stanza two suggests that it is the vagina that has been worn out by the sword, the final stanza perhaps implies that the truer situation is something the reverse. The night remains made for loving; all those lovely Venetian ladies are still out there enjoying the Carnival; but poor old exhausted Byron (‘though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine’) is giving up on it. But need this end to roving entail an end to the making of poems? The pen is mightier, and in some senses a more accurate phallic symbol than, the sword. As Elvis Costello wrote in rather different circumstances:
Poor Fractured Atlas
Threw himself across the mattress
Waving his withering pencil
As if it were a pirate’s cutlass.
It’s the tone of Byron’s lyric, one of a sort of worn-out nearly-maturity, that is its greatest success; and the very obliqueness of the symbolism contributes nicely to that affect. It’s as if the poet is trying, and genuinely so, to express a more-than-physical malaise.
I wonder if the missing link, as it were, in what I’m tempted to call the poem’s vaginal interpretation might be Dante. We know that Byron was reading Dante at around this time, first in English translation and then in the original Italian (in early 1820 he translated a chunk of the Inferno, and wrote his own ‘Prophecy of Dante’). So let’s take the Commedia as an intertext.
At the beginning of the Paradiso, in the very first canto, Dante invokes Apollo as god of poetry to help him scale the impossible heights of his heavenly theme.
O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro
fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,
come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro.Infino a qui l’un giogo di Parnaso
assai mi fu; ma or con amendue
m’è uopo intrar ne l’aringo rimaso.Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
sì come quando Marsïa traesti
de la vagina de le membra sue. [lines 13-21]
Here’s Dorothy L Sayer’s sub-sub-Byronic version:
Gracious Apollo! In this crowning test
Make me the conduit that thy power runs through!
Fit me to wear those bays thou lovest best!One peak of thy Parnassus hitherto
Has well sufficed me, but henceforth I strive
In an arena where I need the two.Breathe in me, breathe, and from my bosom drive
Music like thine, when thou didst long ago
The limbs of Marsyas from their scabbard drive.
Mount Parnassus does indeed have two peaks; one of which was supposed to be inhabited by the (female) Muses, and the other by Apollo himself. Dante will need both, he says, to sing of the fullest reach of Paradise, and he asks Apollo to ‘enter in’ and ‘breathe through him’ so as to produce music of the sort that defeated Marsyas in the famous mythic contest between the mortal and the immortal musicians. This is, as commentators have noted, a rather strange request; as a mortal Dante surely has more in commond with poor old Marsyas, who got himself flayed alive for his pains, than with the divine figure. Except of course that Dante is not challenging, but being properly respectful towards, the god the poetry.
One thing that these lines do is remind us that vagina means for medieval (and indeed modern-day) Italians pretty much what it meant for Ancient Romans. I’m arguing that it is at least possible, and may perhaps be likely, that Byron is deliberately playing off the ‘sheath’ and ‘vagina’ semantic overlap in his poem. There certainly seems to be a consonance between Byron’s world-wearying stripping away of the corporeal body (‘for the soul outwears its breast’) and this Dantean-Marsyan flaying. ‘Inspire me with the force you used to wrench Marsyas’s limbs from theirs sheath’ – ‘de la vagina de le membra sue’. This isn’t just any chunk of Dante’s Commedia; it comes at a crucial turning point in the Commedia. This is the hinge moment when Dante (or narrator-Dante) leaves Hell and Purgatory, with their respective emphases on the physical sufferings or endurances of onetime bodies, to enter into Paradise, where there are no bodies at all, but only a great deal of light, space and air.
The proper literary-scholarly way of advancing an argument of influence here, of course, would be for me to dig out references in Byron’s journal or letters in which he talks about reading that particular bit of the Paradiso, perhaps flagging up the ‘la vagina de le membra sue’ line, and demonstrating that this reference predates the writing of the ‘So We’ll Go No More a Roving’. But I can’t find evidence like that. So I’m going on my gut, and on the balance of likelihoods that Byron read these Dantean lines and was struck by the image of Marsyas being ripped from his skin as if from a ‘sheath’, or indeed as if from a ‘vagina’, by the god of poetry. The likelihood, in other words, that lurking behind his sexualised image of the sword wearing out the sheath is another image of the poet being fatally wrenched from his ‘sheath’.
The image collates poetry, sex, pain and death—the agonising and demeaning end of a poet’s life that is also a kind or trope of glorious transcendence—in a way thoroughly relevant to Byron’s larger poetic project. Because there is something in Byron’s work as a whole that sees sex as more than just a pleasant way of passing the time; that wants to locate a transcendent significance in the act. The rhetoric of muse-inspiration in Dante’s lines, where the poet becomes a ‘vaso’ (literally a ‘vase’, a container) for the ‘spira’ of the god of poetry. Naturally there comes a time when the erotic-poetic inspiration fails, when the poet in effect dies; and it’s the mood of that moment that Byron captures in his lyric.
But what’s interesting to me about this is that it suggests a very different way of reading the poem. It’s not a sexist celebration of the inexhaustible durability of the male phallus, discarding worn-out vaginae left and right. According to this reading Byron is his own vagina; his ‘flesh’ is vaginal, and giving up his carnal adventures becomes figured as a form of flaying off or wearing out of this corporeal covering. We might say that the lyric represents a sort-of valediction to all fleshly or somatic life (except that, to fall back on the cultural-icon of ‘Byron’ again, that might amount to giving up sex. What else is there of somatic life except sex, after all?).
Giving how egregiously famous Byron remains as a shagger of women (his various homosexual adventures notwithstanding) I find it something of a puzzle how little the vagina figures in critical readings of him. When, like a furtive fellow and inwardly preparing what I’d say to my Head of Department if I’m found out, I enter ‘Byron + vagina’ into JSTOR and press ‘search’, nothing comes up. (Actually various things come up, including a 1935 article on ‘Puerperal Sepsis in Wild Ceylon’; but nothing to do with our Byron). This might be less odd if there weren’t so much critical material on Byron and buggery, from Louis Crompton’s Byron and Greek Love (1985) through Andrew Elfenbein’s essay ‘The Shady Side of the Sword: Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli and Byron’s Homosexuality’ (1995) to Gary Dyer’s 2001 reading of Don Juan entitled ‘Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets’. Which sounds like a pretty swinging party. And there’s nothing wrong with being literary-critically interested in that particular orifice, just as Byron certainly was himself. But he wasn’t exclusively interested in that orifice; and I wonder about the reluctance to engage, as it were, the vagina. Maybe the sex-death-transcendence, wearily but beautifully articulated in Byron’s lyric, figures the outworn sheath as in some sense the unspeakable, the unreachable, as the Real of his poetical-dialectical negotiation of symbolic-imaginary discourses. You can see where I’m going with this.
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real Zizek says: “is not the ultimate figure of the passion for the Real the option we get on hardcore websites to observe the inside of a vagina from the vantage point of a tiny camera at the top of a penetrating dildo? … [this is the] extreme point.’ And whilst we are pondering that alluring image he goes on to assert that ‘when we get too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into disgust at the Real of bare flesh.’ Which stands as a nicely Valve-friendly gloss on Byron’s disgust with the erotic flesh in ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’.
Comments
I almost might think that you’re going a-roving for another multitude-of-comments post like “Contra Dante”...
Have you read John Crowley’s novel “Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land”? It’s a novel as if written by Byron, framed by comments as if by Ada Lovelace, framed by an Email conversation between the woman who’s translating it, her lover, and her child-molesting estranged former English professor father who she turns to for help with it, featuring the different views of Byron’s sexuality and general family values among the group. Not quite among Crowley’s best, I thought, but still very good.
The word “pussy” is attested in its sexual meaning about as early as it is in its feline meaning.
I was kind of a hard-ass about the “contra” series, wasn’t I? Sorry, Adam.
I enjoyed this post a bunch, though, and hope to have more to say about it later. (Promissory notes are lame, but I figured it’s better than keeping you in suspense....)
The essay would be a lot better without that last paragraph.
There is nothing in the poem, or the rest of your essay, suggesting that Byron was reacting in disgust at erotic flesh.
Rich: ‘...another multitude-of-comments post ...’ Or not, apparently. Ah well.
I haven’t read the Crowley novel, and in fact feel a bit under-read where Crowley is concerned. Many years ago a friend tremblingly pressed Aegypt into my hands telling me it was the greatest novel ever written. So I read it. I was underwhelmed. I ought to give the guy another go, clearly.
John: “pussy”, yes. You’re doing good work on that website there.
Ray: “I was kind of a hard-ass about the “contra” series, wasn’t I? Sorry, Adam.” Not at all! Nothing to apologise for; hardassness is an admirable dialectical quality.
blah: “The essay would be a lot better without that last paragraph.” Indubitably. And probably without the paragraphs that precede it too. “There is nothing in the poem, or the rest of your essay, suggesting that Byron was reacting in disgust at erotic flesh.” You don’t think there’s any disgust at all in this little poem then? I’d agree that it’s only obliquely representated, if at all; but ‘disgust’. as ‘expression of anti-appetite’, seems to me entirely the tenor of the thing.
One that thing (’I’ll make this a multitude-of-comments post even if I have to post all the comments myself…’). Reading a critical edition of the poetry I’ve belatedly discovered (pace these plagiary-oriented observations) that Byron flat stole his first, and therefore his last, stanza from a Scots ballad. To whit:
And we’ll gang nae mair a-roving
Sae late into the nicht
And we’ll gang nae mair a-roving
Let the moon shine near sae bricht
[‘The Jolly Beggar’; Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs 1776]
Not that this diminishes the poem, I think; and in fact it seems to me to put even more emphasis on the second, sheathily-vaginal stanza. Which is what I spend the whole of this post talking about.
This is fantastic post, one things bothers me though-
The phalocentric reading you reject, is, I think, much less deserving serious consideration, and concrete counter-proof, than you suggest.
The logical structure of the poem’s surface argument makes it impossible to give it any kind of coherence at all if we take that line to be metaphorically making the proposition “Male sexual prowess wears out women”.
Adam: “Many years ago a friend tremblingly pressed Aegypt into my hands telling me it was the greatest novel ever written.”
I’ve never understood why people think that Aegypt is such a great novel. Since I also think that Crowley is one of the five best SF/fantasy writers ever to have written, I know that it’s not because I generally dislike his work. And I’m certainly not the only one not to see it. Some critic really should figure out why opinion of Aegypt varies so widely; it seems like it must tell us something about readership.
The standard recommendation for Crowley’s best book is Little, Big, but for someone with your SF background, I’d recommend starting with Engine Summer instead.
Today’s Fresh Air featured poetry. And a song. Leonard Cohen’s rendition of Byron’s poem. Go listen. It can add some fun to the analysis. It’s a Beach Boys-Tom Waits-Kenny G score, with, and this is the best part, a chorus of women WISTFULLY singing, “The sword has outworn its sheath.” The overall effect is at once screamingly funny, and terrifying. It sounds like a sweet love song, and the the no-more-sex equals no-more-living is consigned to oblivion by the tone of both the score and the lyric. Innerstin. More if anyone cares, and after classes.
Rich; I shall take your recommendation on board. Just as soon as I’ve finished reading my present book. Which is, er, Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers. Which, er, I plan to finish reading some time around the year 2020.
Simone: I’m probably on the wrong side of the Atlantic to know what Fresh Air is. (Is it this by any chance? Can’t find Cohen there though). But I like the idea of funny and terrifying both at once. Byron’s lyric seems to me to have that distinctively Smithsean blend of gloom and funniness.
Peli, I see what you mean: which is to say (not to put words in your mouth, but I assume you’re saying) if the second stanza is saying “Male sexual prowess wears out women” then the roving has to stop because ... why? Because all the women have been worn out? That would be stoopid. And you’re right; the tone of the thing is precisely male exhaustion and giving-up.
That central image is certainly a striking one, though; perhaps because it’s rather contradictory. I don’t know much about swords, but isn’t there an argument that it’s the sheath that wears out the sword, and not the other way around? I mean not wear the metal away entirely, but blunt the cutting egde of the sword, which is it’s most important part? As if the image has got it exactly the wrong way around?
Adam, sorry, sorry, international pop culture tip faux pas. (ducks head in apology) You found the show. The episode is with Billy Collins, about poetry, recordings of. At the very end of the interview is the song. You will have lovely critical fun with it, I promise. [And some of the interview is substantive as well, but I say Some]
“Male exhaustion and giving up,” as you reply to Peli. Precisely. Now, what I don’t follow is how we get from The Exhausted Rover, and a kind of boredom with physical adventure, all the way over to Disgust at the real as (freakishly) offered in the cocks-eye view of the vagina. [I’ll set how Zizek’s Lacanian female body=real=unspeakable bothers me for now, and that the vagina is no more apt a symbol for disgust at the real than, say, the inside of the gender-neutral throat.] The exhaustion is not without love, as disgust would have to be. “The heart must pause to breathe/And Love itself have rest.” There’s a parallel construction all through this stanza, all of it pointing (sorry to get Old School New Critical here, but I do that) to a natural, inevitable kind of end game. Shag enough, and even That can get dull after a while. Something else must come into the mix eventually. “The soul outwears the breast”—the soul is not dulled on the breast (as swords are by cutting flesh, so to need sharpening), nor does it destroy the breast, the soul wears the breast as long as it can, and then leaves. “Outwear” as in simply no longer needs, and so surrenders. The same verb twice. A play in connotation (very likely), but also a very strong parallel.
28? Right about the age most Lothario’s retire. Eventually it’s not bodies and shagging that are so central to the masculine psyche. Plus, Lothario himself is not always so dangerously handsome have a hard life of drinking and shagging (though I met exceptions). There’s love and tenderness, a regret for the MBDTK days, in this poem.
And, well, all flesh is vaginal. It’s all capable of being stabbed and rent. Which process is what dulls blade, all that smashing against bones, and sharpening which corrects, is what wears out a sword. Killing is what wears out a sword. A scabbard’s got rather little to do with it. Sexist nonsense. Vagina gum-tata. Back to flesh, which is vaginal, soft and capable of wearing down, wearing out;-- it’s all tissues through which substances pass. All bodies have openings into/out of which substances pass and are transformed—just not so amazingly as in the womb is all. And male bodies just don’t do this quite of obviously, or gaze-ably. So, could B’s poem also represent not disgust at the real/feminine but a relaxing into sharing its/her condition? --- and there my occasional annoyance with Z, and permanent annoyance with L (as am with Irigaray m’self) creeps back in.
And yes, a bit Smith-y… which complicates my meandering here.
I want to suggest a slightly different dichotomy to read into “sword-sheath/ soul-breast”:
I think a possible reading might take the dichotomy as parallel to -
I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling
Which is a very different body\soul dichotomy than the one suggested here- corporal passions, sensations, and even the realset of the real - blood, bone and marrow, are all part of the spirit here, and what is left for the clay ("b : the human body as distinguished from the spirit") is the practical, non-problematic functional aspects of the body, and probably common sense and streangth of character and and patience and other such properties that make the opposite of “blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling”.
So, I want to suggest reading the sexual lust, or at least the psychological, aesthetic and existensial aspects of the sexual lust, as bleonging to the “sword-soul” side, and the healthy functionality of mental and physical faculties, sexual or not, as belongong to the sheath\breast side . Thus, the poem says - I’m as love\lust crazed as ever (The heart be still as loving), but I have utterly overwhelmed myself and must take a halt or I’m going to go insane-
And here come the lines most of the discussion seemd to ignore:
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
these do not so much suggest being bored as it suggests being overwhelmed.
Simone: “what I don’t follow is how we get from The Exhausted Rover, and a kind of boredom with physical adventure, all the way over to Disgust at the real as (freakishly) offered in the cocks-eye view of the vagina...” Yes, well the Zizek thing (very problematical, I agree) is OTT. But I’d still say that there is a form of disgust at play in the poem. Not, of course, the visceral ‘yuk!’ barf-reflex sort of disgust; but a subtler sense in which the gustus, the taste for, the enjoyment of, sex and for living has become dis-. Seems to me there are lots of ways in which disgust of this sort can register; and the visceral gut-heave is the least of it.
“the soul is not dulled on the breast (as swords are by cutting flesh, so to need sharpening), nor does it destroy the breast, the soul wears the breast as long as it can, and then leaves.” But is this right? The traditional reading of the poem, I suppose, is precisely that it articulates the way indulegences in something as perishable as flesh can lead a person to soul-weariness (depression, I suppose we’d say today). I don’t doubt that your spirit is endlessly elastic and imperishable. I’m sorry to say that mine isn’t. Not that I’ve arrived at a state of soul weariness by living the Byronic lifestyle, of course. But that only makes my predicament sadder. I think.
My last comment perhaps gives the impression that I disagree with what Simone says; but I don’t, at all, (I’d say she’s pretty much spot-on) except for the niggles mentioned above.
Peli: the overwhelm; yes; a really intriguing reading of the poem. I suppose I’d expect a lyric written (as this reading implies) on the verge of a nervous breakdown would be a little more, I don’t know, keyed-up, hyper, hysterical. But I see what you mean; and it’s certainly possible that my taking of the poem as in effect a piece of Smiths-y melancholia may be just as wide of the mark.
Hi,
I love your idea of Bryon’s Vagina. I’m presently writing my thesis (due next May) and my focus will be, god willing, a variety of vaginal interpretations of texts, a galley, of sorts, of what I’d like to think of as the articulate Vagina. I haven’t got it all thought out or through yet, but I’d love to correspond with you further on this.