Like Parzival and Silence, the poems in these excepts emphasize an ideal of beauty that is not gender specific. The young men of the Hebrew love poetry and the cup-bearer of Al-Sharif al Taliq's poem are both described in what we would now consider to be feminine terms - the lips, flushed cheeks, slender thighs and thin waist are all physical attributes that we would not consider fully masculine today. Rather, they are signs of youth, boyishness, or femininity - all qualities that make the young man of the poet's gaze an object of desire to the presumably older man.
(This makes me wonder if there is much poetry celebrating masculine beauty from this time. I would think that objectifying a full-grown man would be seen as transgressive, as would the expression of female desire, but I could be wrong.)
What I thought was most interesting was Serrano's comment that the sex of the beloved in Al-Sharif al Taliq's writing is actually not known, nor is it important: "The use of the masculine pronoun in referring to the beloved...does not necessarily mean that he is male. Love poems of this period sometimes addressed women with masculine pronouns and masculine forms of nouns. The gender of the addressee here is ambiguous and probably irrelevant" (153).
According to Serrano, all extra-marital desire was considered illicit, so the desire of a man for a young man instead of a young woman would not have been thought of as any more scandalous to express. Where we would now view the divide between homosexual and heterosexual desire as stark, the line between marriage and non-marriage was the primary consideration.
I agree, Rose, that the gender of the beloved in al Taliq's poetry is not important because, as according to Serrano, the important thing is that the poem conceals or covers up the beloved's body, irrespective of whether it is a female or male body.
ReplyDeleteThis point - the "cover" point - confused me a bit, however, because I think that most poets (and writers, for that matter) work to encase or "cover" the meanings behind their works in figures of speech and metaphors and so forth. I'm not exactly sure what is so special here...?
I have to say that I, too, was surprised to read such a seemingly casual portrayal of desire for young men, and I feel that Serrano's remark about the gender of the beloved is not fully explained. Why was it acceptable to use male pronouns for a female beloved? And why was homosexual desire equivalent to extramarital heterosexual desire? And since this is a society wherein monogamy through marriage also served to prevent many a massive hereditary issue... why were so many poets so cavalier about any extramarital desire? ...Or am I missing that these poems were a lot more scandalous than they seem?
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect, but gender is important, and it was specially in the Middle Ages. We just read a book written about the complain of nature because relations that were against it order. The use of male pronouns for women came from somewhere; it is clear to me that the firsts poems with male pronouns were for male, and the poets invented that they used the male pronouns because of stylistic reasons. The the rest of the poets bought it.
ReplyDelete'Homosexuality' is a modern word, but 'sodomy' is not and it was the name of a sin, a totally different sin than adultery. There were sodomites during the middle ages and they wrote poetry, even though some poets used the male pronoun for women... for some extrange reason.