Sex Magick In Verse: The Lost Poems of Fra Filippo Lippi

 

What she tells me here is of a poem that appears in Fra Filippo Lippi's canto XII of the "Orlando Innamorato" (1499). After the consummation of his love with Phoebus, Alcestis ("Revere" in English) falls asleep. On awakening, he discovers that Phoebus has performed a ritual that has transformed her feet into those of a corpse, a bizarre scene for one of the most poignant and important poems in Western literature. From that moment on, the lovers are never again able to touch each other.

Steiner went on to discuss the connection between memory and love, and the ways in which love's greatest weaknesses can be a source of its greatest strengths:

We shall not feel so soon as we knew, not as we remember; our memory is a strong thing, but not so strong as the time of life, the way life moves and shapes our minds and souls; that by the time the idea is not so fresh in one's mind as it is, or the feeling is not such a strong one; and we will not feel so soon as we did, not as we remember, not as we remember; that by the time the memory is stilled, we feel the love that has sprung up anew between us.

Standing in the same city, one could smell the dead body, hear the ghost's voice, feel the phantoms of her feet walking over his, and yet the memory would never be the same. It would always be those fine candles, the spirit of her hungry mouth, her sharp nails, and the obsidian foot that had so transformed herself, with its antique words and strange accents. That is the courage that poets must have, the courage that also unites poets, in every age.

"Dear Ones," another poem from Fra Filippo Lippi's "Orlando Innamorato," describes the poet's path to this courage. Like its predecessor, it relies on a twist on the above story to illustrate an important point: as Max Bell notes in his excellent essay on the poems, the love poem emerges "as a series of discrete fragments that somehow correspond to one another despite their indefinite nature. A web of associations, memories, and associations, these fragments are torn away from their original meanings and enveloped in a new, strange context." The same poem, one after the other, traces the poet's journey from a sort of nervous breakdown to the act of passion, culminating in a single moment that speaks to all of his or her emotions: "he loved her".

The poem's structure is open to multiple interpretations. Fra Filippo Lippi is frequently labeled a trickster, and the poet's narrative features many absurd coincidences that, given the conditions of the time and place, would be odd in any case, but these elements, as Bell points out, "functioned in the poem as symbols of the tensions that define human intimacy." Perhaps the most straightforward reading is that the poem "reflected the poet's inner struggle to reconcile love with reason.