2003 FRQ #1

EPQE1

 Eros 

I call for love 

But help me, who arrives? 

This thug with broken nose 

And squinty eyes. 

5 ‘Eros, my bully boy, 

Can this be you, 

With boxer lips 

And patchy wings askew?’ 

Why hast thou nothing in thy face? 

Thou idol of the human race, 

Thou tyrant of the human heart, 

The flower of lovely youth that art; 

5 Yea, and that standest in thy youth 

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair, 

That only Pheidias2 might compare, 

Ere from his chaste marmoreal3 form 

10 Time had decayed the colours warm; 

Like to his gods in thy proud dress, 

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind, 

For in thy face is nought to find, 

15 Only thy soft unchristen’d smile, 

That shadows neither love nor guile, 

But shameless will and power immense, 

In secret sensuous innocence. 

O king of joy, what is thy thought? 

20 I dream thou knowest it is nought, 

And wouldst in darkness come, but thou 

Makest the light where’er thou go. 

Ah yet no victim of thy grace, 

None who e’er long’d for thy embrace, 

25 Hath cared to look upon thy face. 

—Robert Bridges (1899)

‘Madam,’ cries Eros, 

10 ‘Know the brute you see 

Is what long overuse 

Has made of me. 

My face that so offends you 

Is the sum 

15 Of blows your lust delivered 

One by one. 

We slaves who are immortal 

Gloss your fate 

And are the archetypes 

20 That you create. 

Better my battered visage, 

Bruised but hot, 

Than love dissolved in loss 

Or left to rot.’ 

--Anne Stevenson (1990)