Orpheus' Hymn to Love

Orpheus, Thomas Taylor (T) · The Masque of Love Series · 5 pages

Five pages carrying the Orphic hymn to Love in Thomas Taylor's verse translation, prefaced by two epigraphs — Shakespeare on the Promethean fire in women's eyes, from Love's Labour's Lost, and Emerson's couplet that if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being. As with the other Orphic hymns in this library, the prescribed ritual is printed as part of the text: fumigation from aromatics.

The hymn addresses Love as the source of sweet delight, holy and pure and charming to the sight — and then, in the same breath, as darting and winged, impetuous fierce desire, a wandering fire that plays with gods and mortals alike. The two characters are not reconciled but held together, which is the point of the poem. Love is called agile and twofold, and keeper of the keys of heaven and earth, the air and the spreading seas — a jurisdiction then extended across everything Ceres' fertile realms contain, everything the all-parent goddess sustains, and everything dismal Tartarus is doomed to keep, widely extended or in the sounding deep. From that the central claim follows: all Nature's various realms obey him, and he rules alone with universal sway. The closing couplet is a petition of the ordinary Orphic kind, asking the blessed power to regard these mystic fires — and, since the god just described is desire itself, to avert unlawful mad desires far away.

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