Read Ebook: The literature of kissing by Bombaugh Charles C Charles Carroll

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Ebook has 1957 lines and 122888 words, and 40 pages

Ovid appropriates the kiss most effectively in his passages descriptive of the endearments, the fascinations, the yearnings, and the transports of love. Briseis in her letter to Achilles, begging him to return to the Grecian camp, is made to say:

"Oh that the Greeks would send me hence to try If I could make your stubborn heart comply! Few words I'd use; all should be sighs, and tears, And looks, and kisses, mixed with hopes and fears; My love like lightning through my eyes should fly, And thaw the ice which round your heart does lie; Sometimes my arms about your neck I'd throw; And then embrace your knees and humbly bow. There is more eloquence in tears and kisses Than in the smooth harangues of sly Ulysses."

In the letter of Sappho to her lover, Phaon, when he had forsaken her, and she had resolved upon suicide, we have a picture of that "sorrow's crown of sorrow," the remembrance in adversity of happier days:

"Yet once your Sappho could your cares employ, Once in her arms you centred all your joy; Still all those joys to my remembrance move, For, oh, how vast a memory has love! My music then you could forever hear, And all my words were music to your ear; You stopped with kisses my enchanting tongue, And found my kisses sweeter than my song. The fair Sicilians now your soul inflame: Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame?"

A wife's affection is shown in the letter of Laodanna to her husband at Aulis with the Grecian fleet:

"Yet while before the leaguer thou dost lie, Thy picture is some pleasure to my eye; There must be something in it more than art, 'Twere very thee, could it thy mind impart: I kiss the pretty idol, and complain, As if 'twould answer me again."

This pretty conceit, which the moderns have often copied from Ovid, occurs in the epistle of Paris to Helen:

"If you your young Hermione but kiss, Straight from her lips I snatch the envied bliss."

In his "Art of Love" Ovid thus pursues his course of instruction:

"Tears, too, are of utility: by tears you will move adamant. Make her, if you can, to see your moistened cheeks. If tears shall fail you, for indeed they do not always come in time, touch your eyes with your wet hand. What discreet person will not mingle kisses with tender words? Though she should not grant them, still take them ungranted. Perhaps she will struggle at first, and will say, 'You naughty man!' Still, in her struggling she will wish to be overcome. Only, let them not, rudely snatched, hurt her tender lips, and take care that she may not be able to complain that they have proved a cause of pain. He who has gained kisses, if he cannot gain the rest as well, will deserve to lose even that which has been granted him. How much is there wanting for unlimited enjoyment after a kiss! Oh, shocking! 'twere clownishness, not modesty. Call it violence, if you like; such violence is pleasing to the fair; they often wish, through compulsion, to grant what they are delighted to grant."

Turning from Ovid to the Greek Anthology, we find this epigram:

"The kiss that she left on my lip Like a dew-drop shall lingering lie: 'Twas nectar she gave me to sip, 'Twas nectar I drank in her sigh!

"The dew that distilled in that kiss To my soul was voluptuous wine: Ever since it is drunk with the bliss, And feels a delirium divine."

Anacreon, in one of his odes, speaks of the heart flying to the lips; and Plato, in a distich quoted by Aulus Gellius, tells us of the effect of a kiss upon his susceptibility:

"Whene'er thy nectared kiss I sip, And drink thy breath in melting twine, My soul then flutters to my lip, Ready to fly and mix with thine."

Plato also wrote:

"My soul, when I kissed Agathon, did start Up to my lips, just ready to depart."

"Oh! on that kiss my soul, As if in doubt to stay, Lingered awhile, on fluttering wing prepared To fly away."

Anacreon uses this figurative expression:

"They tainted all his bowl of blisses, His bland desires and hallowed kisses."

"Or leave a kiss within the cup, And I'll not ask for wine,"--

are translated from Philostratus, a Greek poet of the second century.

Lucian has a conceit upon the same idea: "that you may at once both drink and kiss." And Meleager says:

"Blest is the goblet, oh! how blest, Which Heliodora's lips have pressed! Oh! might thy lips but meet with mine, My soul should melt away in thine."

Agathias also says:

"I love not wine; but thou hast power T' intoxicate at any hour. Touch first the cup with thine own lip, Then hand it round for mine to sip, And temperance at once gives way; My sweet cup-bearer wins the day. That cup's a boat which ferries over Thy kiss in safety to thy lover, And tells by its delicious flavor Plow much it revels in thy favor."

Longepierre, to give an idea of the luxurious estimation in which garlands were held by the ancients, relates an anecdote of a frail beauty, who, in order to gratify three lovers without leaving cause for jealousy with any of them, gave a kiss to one, let the other drink after her, and put a garland on the brow of the third; so that each was satisfied with his favor, and flattered himself with the preference.

In one of Anacreon's odes we find the strong and beautiful phrase, "a lip provoking kisses."

"Then her lip, so rich in blisses, Sweet petitioner for kisses."

Tatius speaks of "lips soft and delicate for kissing;" and that grave old commentator, Lambinus, in his notes upon Lucretius, tells us, with all the authority of experience, that girls who have large lips kiss infinitely sweeter than others!

AEneas Sylvius, in his story of the loves of Euryalus and Lucretia, where he particularizes the beauties of the heroine, describes her lips as exquisitely adapted for biting. And Catullus, in his poems , asks, "Whom will you love now? Whose will you be called? Whom will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite? But you, Catullus, be stubbornly obdurate." As Lamb has it:

"Whose fondling care shalt thou avow? Whose kisses now shalt thou return? Whose lip in rapture bite? But thou, Hold, hold, Catullus, cold and stern."

Or, as Elton renders it:

"Whom wilt thou for thy lover choose? Whose shall they call thee, false one, whose? Who shall thy darted kisses sip, While thy keen love-bites scar his lip? But thou, Catullus, scorn to feel: Persist--and let thy heart be steel."

Plautus alludes to this biting; and Horace says , as already quoted:

"Or on thy lips the fierce fond boy Marks with his teeth the furious joy."

Plutarch tells us that Flora, the mistress of Cn. Pompey, used to say, in commendation of her lover, that she could never quit his arms without giving him a bite. And Tibullus, in his confession of his illicit love for Delia, the wife of another, and of his devices for covering his tracks, says, among other things, "I gave her juices and herbs for removing the livid marks which mutual Venus makes by the impress of the teeth."

Anacreon finds in the brevity of life arguments for the voluptuary as well as for the moralist:

"Can we discern, with all our lore, The path we're yet to journey o'er? No, no, the walk of life is dark, 'Tis wine alone can strike a spark! Then let me quaff the foamy tide, And through the dance meandering glide; Let me imbibe the spicy breath Of odors chafed to fragrant death, Or from the kiss of love inhale A more voluptuous, richer gale."

Of the amatory writers who exhaust rhetoric to express the infinity of kisses which they require from the lips of their mistresses, Catullus takes the lead. In his famous verses to Lesbia , he says:

"Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and a farthing for all the talk of morose old sages! Suns may set and rise again; but we, when once our brief light has set, must sleep through a perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then still another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we shall have made up many thousands, we will confuse the reckoning, so that we ourselves may not know their amount, nor any spiteful person have it in his power to envy us when he knows that our kisses were so many."

The following metrical versions of the foregoing are worth a place here. The first is by George Lamb :

"Love, my Lesbia, while we live; Value all the cross advice That the surly graybeards give At a single farthing's price.

"Suns that set again may rise; We, when once our fleeting light, Once our day in darkness dies, Sleep in one eternal night.

"Give me kisses thousand-fold, Add to them a hundred more; Other thousands still be told, Other hundreds, o'er and o'er.

"But, with thousands when we burn, Mix, confuse the sums at last, That we may not blushing learn All that have between us past.

"None shall know to what amount Envy's due for so much bliss; None--for none shall ever count All the kisses we will kiss."

The second is by C. A. Elton, whose translations of the classic poets were first published in 1814:

In another poem addressed to Lesbia , Catullus says:

"You ask how many kisses of yours, Lesbia, maybe enough for me; and more. As the numerous sands that lie on the spicy shores of Cyrene, between the oracle of sultry Jove and the sacred tomb of old Battus; or as the many stars that in the silence of night behold men's furtive amours; to kiss you with so many kisses is enough and more for madly fond Catullus; such a multitude as prying gossips can neither count, nor bewitch with their evil tongues."

Lamb's translation is as follows:

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