Having stretched out rosy-rumped Doris across the bed
in verdant flowers, I have now become immortal.
For she, bestriding me midmost with her exquisite legs,
achieved unswerving Cypris’ lengthy race.
Her eyes gaze languidly, like leaves in the wind,
while tossing all about, she trembled sanguine,
until sacred wine poured out white strength from us both,
and Doris languidly lay with relaxed limbs.
This is a poem that would indeed cause a racket in certain quarters. Not because it is obscene—it is not. Not because it is exploitative—it is not that either. But because it refuses to submit to the categories that contemporary discourse demands.
Consider what is actually happening here. The poet describes an act of mutual pleasure. “Sacred wine poured out white strength from us both.” Not from him. Not from her. From both. The ecstasy is shared. The satisfaction is mutual. The language is elevated—”immortal,” “sacred,” “Cypris” herself, the goddess of love, presiding over the race. This is not pornography. This is hymn.
And yet the physicality is unmistakable. The rosy rump. The exquisite legs. The languid eyes. The trembling. The relaxed limbs afterward. The poem insists that the physical and the sacred can inhabit the same space, that the act of love is worthy of the same language we use for the gods.
The woke critic would not know what to do with this. There is no power imbalance to condemn—the pleasure is mutual. There is no objectification to decry—the woman is described with the same reverence as the act itself. There is no political framework that fits. The poem simply is what it is: a celebration of two bodies finding joy in each other.
The ancient poet would be puzzled by the demand that he take sides, that he declare himself an ally or an oppressor, that he submit his private ecstasy to public adjudication. He would wonder why the lovers in his epigram must be diagnosed rather than simply seen.
Perhaps that is the elegy’s deepest challenge to woke culture: that some experiences resist political reduction. That the act of love, in its fullness, transcends the categories we try to impose upon it. That a man and a woman can meet as equals in the space of desire and emerge, both, transformed.
Dioscorides understood this two thousand years ago. We are still catching up.
