Passionate Friends

[wolfinthewood]

Secondhand book find of the week: set of Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury, at an affordable £20 for three fat volumes. I’ve wanted that for years, but it doesn’t turn up often and it’s usually quite expensive. Originally published in 1905, it hauled the poems of the seventeenth-century homoerotic poet Katherine Philips (‘Orinda’) out of the total obscurity into which they had then fallen.

Saintsbury’s text of the poem below seems to have one or two readings that improve a little on the edition I used years ago in my anthology Love Shook My Senses; whichever edition that was. I can’t remember now. Anyway, I think Saintsbury’s ‘crown-conqueror’s’ is better than ‘crown’d conqueror’s’ (Philips was a royalist), and ‘flames’ than ‘flame’.

To My Excellent Lucasia,
on our Friendship

17th July 1651

I did not live until this time
Crown’d my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but Thee.

This carcass breath’d, and walk’d, and slept,
So that the World believ’d
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they were all deceiv’d.

For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine;

Which now inspires, cures and supplies,
And guides my darken’d breast:
For thou art all that I can prize,
My Joy, my Life, my Rest.

Nor bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth
To mine compar’d can be:
They have but pieces of this Earth,
I’ve all the World in thee.

Then let our flames still light and shine,
(And no bold fear control),
As innocent as our design,
Immortal as our soul.

Katherine Philips (1632–1664)


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Comments

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.