“It’s such a pity that we don’t have
Anything like a photograph
Of her about whom the ancients rave . . .”

He’d been talking about the well-known tale
Of her lawyer at her blasphemy trial
Baring her breasts to gain an acquittal.

Now, it wasn’t the ‘beauty’ of what they saw
That made the judges loosen the law,
But what’s been described as ‘sacred awe.’

Would visual be better than verbal, though,
Projected into the long-ago
Till we think we know what we’ll never know?

Fragments, copies, our museums still hold
Of statues she modelled, or so we’re told
(Though not the Delphi one in gold).

Well, at Thespiae, how did they feel as
Praxiteles, daring celestial malice,
Set up together, on equal pillars

Statues of her and of Aphrodite.
A girl and a Goddess damn-near Almighty
With a temper not to be taken lightly?

He could only pre-empt their sacred fear
With what could unarguably appear
As spillover from another sphere

On to physique made partly free
From the pressures of externality
Which is all that the subtlest lens can see.

(And Marilyns, Sophias, the very cream
Of our time, aren’t sewn without a seam
Directly into the fabric of dream.)

But she’s gone! Long gone! Gone to the grave
And left us, instead of a photograph,
The residual glow of an ancient grief.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 Number 2, on page 37
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