This week's "poem" is an excerpt from Christopher Marlowe's epyllion, Hero and Leander, a splendid piece of narrative verse that was never completed – or not by Marlowe. It was entered into the Stationer's Register in 1593, a few months after the dramatist's alleged murder in a tavern brawl, and, at that stage, consisted of only two cantos. In 1598, George Chapman completed the poem with four more cantos, one of them an extensive digression, "The Tale of Teras", and additional "arguments" to all six. It was Chapman who called the cantos "Sestyads", on the principle of the Iliad, so named because it focused on events in Ilium. The tale of Hero and Leander is set largely in Hero's birthplace, Sestos.
Both Ovid and the grammarian-poet Musaeus are sources for Marlowe's story. Leander and Hero are lovers separated by the ill-famed Hellespont (now the Dardanelles). "Abydus and Sestos were two ancient towns," Chapman explains, "one in Europe, another in Asia, opposite …" Hero is a priestess of Venus, sworn to life-long chastity. The beautiful young man, Leander, visits Sestos for the Feast of Adonis, and thus the tragedy is set in motion.
Musaeus locates the antagonistic force in Hero's parents: Marlowe substitutes Leander's father. Leander's courtship begins with argument – how can an acolyte of Venus be expected to be chaste? Hero is swayed, eventually, but, since the two must meet in secret, Leander swims the Hellespont each night to be with her, while Hero lights his way from the top of her tower with a flaming torch. The plan works until winter sets in, Hero's light is extinguished by the wind, and Leander comes to grief in angry seas.
Marlowe must have intended to write the whole story; nevertheless, he crams his opening "sestyads" with such colour and event that, in a way, the project seems complete. There are gorgeous descriptive passages. We see Hero's exotic garments, her ground-length veil and buskins of silvered shells; we visit the Temple of Venus, underneath whose glass floor there are foreshadowing depictions of the gods-in-love, "committing heady riots, incests, rapes". Marlowe plunges Leander into the Hellespont as soon as is feasible, and gives sinewy play to a homoerotic sub-plot: the "sapphire-visaged" Neptune falls for Leander, and Leander almost reciprocates.
Marlowe's narrative ends with the erotic triumphs depicted below. It's not the most rich figuratively, but the passage fascinatingly reflects the ambiguity with which Hero receives her suitor, and the equally mixed feelings the Jacobean writer-reader must have felt towards women's perceived duplicity. Marlowe is under some euphemistic constraint, but it appears, from previous references to a "truce", that Leander ejaculates before he penetrates Hero, and that Hero "consents" to further intercourse without being entirely clear about what's going on. Notice the war imagery of their love-making. Marlowe finds little tenderness in sex, and proclaims the fact: "Love is not full of pity, as men say …" In other words, both men and women are ruthlessly hard-driven by their instincts.
The whole escapade churns with restless emotional and physical undercurrents. There's a psychologically astute, and visually arresting, moment when Hero, remembering how the adultery of Mars and Venus was exposed when Vulcan trapped them in an iron net, tries to flee the bed. But "as her naked feet were whipping out," Leander grabs her, and she falls to the floor, her body half-exposed like that of a mermaid. After this tussle, she stands up at her full height, naked, blushing but, surely, magnificently composed. The self-satisfied Leander is unromantically perceived as Dis, god of the Underworld, greedily contemplating his gold.
Marlowe speaks of the strange twilight on Hero's face, and, painting the larger scene, he shows us, instead of the morning star, the evening star, Hesperus. This "false morn" casts eerie shadows across the moment of glory. Night drives off in a fury, as if channelling some of Hero's emotional turmoil. For now, though, both lovers are satisfied.
Chapman takes up the story in a way typical of the gifted scholar and translator. He is too lavish with brilliant ideas. He can't tell us about Hero's torch without building an elaborate moral analogy from the fact that "when bees make wax, Nature does not intend/ It shall be made a torch …" Not that he's a bad poet, but he doesn't get to the point with Marlowe's purposefuless, nor tease out those psychological strands which, to Marlowe's deep-sea-diving imagination, are at least as dramatic as external action.
From the Second Sestyad of Hero and Leander
Even as a bird, which in our hands we wring,
Forth plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing,
She trembling strove; this strife of hers, like that
Which made the world, another world begat
Of unknown joy. Treason was in her thought,
And cunningly to yield herself she sought.
Seeming not won, yet won she was at length;
In such wars women use but half their strength.
Leander now, like Theban Hercules,
Entered the orchard of th'Hesperides;
Whose fruit none rightly can describe, but he
That pulls or shakes it from the golden tree.
Wherein Leander on her quivering breast,
Breathless spoke something, and sighed out the rest;
Which so prevailed, as he, with small ado,
Enclosed her in his arms and kissed her too;
And every kiss to her was as a charm,
And to Leander as a fresh alarm:
So that the truce was broke, and she, alas,
Poor silly maiden, at his mercy was!
Love is not full of pity, as men say,
But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.
And now she wished this night were never done,
And sighed to think upon th'approaching sun;
For much it grieved her that the bright day-light
Should know the pleasure of this blessed night,
And them, like Mars and Ericyne, display,
Both in each other's arms chained as they lay.
Again, she knew not how to frame her look,
Or speak to him, who in a moment took
That which so long, so charily she kept;
And fain by stealth away she would have crept,
And to some corner secretly have gone,
Leaving Leander in the bed alone.
But as her naked feet were whipping out,
He on the sudden clinged her so about,
That mermaid-like, unto the floor she slid;
One half appeared, the other half was hid.
Thus near the bed she blushing stood upright,
And from her countenance behold ye might
A kind of twilight break, which through the hair
As from an orient cloud, glimpsed here and there;
And round about the chamber this false morn
Brought forth the day before the day was born.
So Hero's ruddy cheek Hero betrayed,
And her all naked to his sight displayed:
Whence his admiring eyes more pleasure took
Than Dis, on heaps of gold fixing his look.
By this, Apollo's golden harp began
To sound forth music to the ocean;
Which watchful Hesperus no sooner heard,
But he the bright Day-bearing car prepared,
And ran before, as harbinger of light,
And with his flaring beams mocked ugly Night,
Till she, o'ercome with anguish, shame, and rage,
Danged down to hell her loathsome carriage.