Writer Anne Enright revealed in a newspaper interview the other day that her eyes were opened to "literary sex" by a teacher in Canada when she was 16. They were reading La Belle Dame Sans Merci at the time. "She made moan" said the teacher - "Well, we know what that's about."
Being straight from convent school, Anne was shocked and outraged: "You've ruined Keats for me!"
I know the feeling. As young students, many of us used to adore Shelley as a great romantic poet until a teacher revealed that he (Shelley, not our teacher) left a new wife and child behind to run off to Switzerland with not one but two teenage girls. After that, we felt drowning was too good for him. Shelley ruined Shelley for us and we could never enjoy a cooling west wind, never mind the West Wind, again. That's how it is when you're young. Still, Ms Enright should have guessed about Keats. When you're a teenager, anything with a French title is almost guaranteed to be filthy.
After the shock of La Belle Dame, Ms Enright's school class next encountered Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (what is it with Canadian schools?). This must have been like staggering away from a car crash only to be hit by a truck, and from there on it was naturally all downhill. The conjunction of sex and literature was complete.
Literary sex is a very broad field, but I can claim some expertise as a result of my own seminal work, Irish Poetry: Between the Lines (Hutchinson, 395 pps, £40), wherein I trace the story all the way (so to speak) from mind-boggling innocence to completely uninhibited sexuality. The innocence doesn't take up much space. It more or less starts and ends with William Allingham's Four Ducks on a Pond. I had wanted to include the same poor harmless lad's better-known poem, The Fairies ("Up the airy mountains, down the rushy glen" and all that) but my editorial assistant at the time, Ms Aristea Feathering-Clough, pointed out a number of submerged sexual references.
To start with, there was the title. Aristea - now an associate university professor in Vancouver (oddly enough) - was one of the early postmodernists, and my fairies were not her fairies. I tried to protest that young Willie Allingham could hardly have even heard of homosexuality in mid-19th-century Donegal but was overruled.
In reality, my assistant pointed out, the lines "we daren't go a-hunting, for fear of little men" were a clear reference to the impossibility of lesbians revealing their sexuality, never mind living together openly in the hideously repressed rural Ireland of the time.
Furthermore, "They have planted thorn trees, for pleasure here and there" openly flaunted the fairies' sado-masochistic leanings, and - well, I must say I was shocked as Aristea reinterpreted the poem for me, line by line. The result was that I had to shift The Fairies hurriedly to the back of the book. There it sat along with blatantly sexual poems such as Yeats's The Stolen Child (his brave attempt to get inside the mind of the pederast), Thomas Davis's A Nation Once Again (a fine exposition of teenage hormonal imbalance) and James Clarence Mangan's Dark Rosaleen, a passionate address to his mistress, cleverly disguised as a patriotic ode.
But Aristea and I, who I should admit were having a between-the-lines relationship ourselves at the time, had an awful row over the inclusion of poor old Thomas Moore. We had already had angry exchanges over The Meeting of the Waters, into which Aristea read unspeakable sexual references. But as far as I was concerned, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls was entirely out of bounds for our purposes. To me it was a paean to proud preChristian Ireland, and a coded call to arms once again. The notion that it was in any way sexual seemed incredible.
Aristea had other ideas. For her, the poem was Moore's "great ode to impotence" and she mused fondly over the lines "So sleeps the pride of former days, so glory's thrill is o'er . . . "
Against my wishes, Aristea managed to have the poem included in our anthology. But the row marked the end of our relationship. It is true that my passion for her had already cooled, but I could not help feeling that Aristea was using Moore's great poem against me, as we climbed the stairs to bed and she bitterly intoned:
No more to chiefs and ladies bright, the harp of Tara swells.
The chord alone, that breaks at night, its tale of ruin tells.
bglacken@irish-times.ie