Something that got cut in the final round from the new hundred poems project. Not because it's not good, but because I already had Hero and Leander and Orchestra and didn't have "The Fairies Farewell."

Ovid's Banquest of Sense* (text starts here) by George Chapman is a very odd duck. It is, essentially an Elizabethan Ovid/Julia the Elder Historical RPF in verse. What's odder than all that, however, is that is both highly sensuous, dealing with a seduction organized by treating each of the canonical five senses in turn, and strongly metaphysical, with passages that but for the meter could almost have been written by Donne. It is also highly erotic, though the story breaks off before the seduction is consummated (darn it).

All of which ought to clearly make it an Ovidian erotic narrative. But it does not fit well among others of the genre, most notably because it's Ovidian by being about Ovid rather than imitating him. It is also strikingly more original than most, Hero and Leander being its best rival in that regard.

I do wish it were better known.


* Don't be put off by the title -- in modern idiom, it would be "banquet of the senses." The Elizabethan orthography of the only text I can find online is, however, understandably rebarbative.

---L.