T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
The Picture
By Anacreon (582485 B.C.)(From the Odes; translated by Thomas Stanley, 1651) |
PAINTER, by unmatch’d desert | |
Master of the Rhodian art, | |
Come, my absent mistress take, | |
As I shall describe her: make | |
First her hair, as black as bright, | 5 |
And if colors so much right | |
Can but do her, let it too | |
Smell of aromatic dew; | |
Underneath this shade, must thou | |
Draw her alabaster brow; | 10 |
Her dark eyebrows so dispose | |
That they neither part nor close, | |
But by a divorce so slight | |
Be disjoin’d, may cheat the sight: | |
From her kindly killing eye | 15 |
Make a flash of lightning fly, | |
Sparkling like Minerva’s, yet | |
Like Cythera’s mildly sweet: | |
Roses in milk swimming seek | |
For the pattern of her cheek: | 20 |
In her lip such moving blisses, | |
As from all may challenge kisses; | |
Round about her neck (outvying | |
Parian stone) the Graces flying; | |
And o’er all her limbs at last | 25 |
A loose purple mantle cast; | |
But so ordered that the eye | |
Some part naked may descry, | |
An essay by which the rest | |
That lies hidden may be guess’d. | 30 |
So, to life th’ hast come so near, | |
All of her, but voice, is here. | |