Page 22 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

blossom, river with river, interjection with interjection, song with song. His palace, potential abode of the twice erotic becomes an ardent game as ardent as tango. For in Comus’ cup, no anger and sorrow dwell, only the lust of spring.
“Here dwell no frowns, nor anger, from these gates Sorrow flies far: See, here be all the pleasures
That fancy can beget on youthful thoughts,
When the fresh blood grows lively, and returns Brisk as the April buds in Primrose-season.”
(667-71)
It could not be any other way. Eroticism is not just thirst for otherness, but for otherness to become erotic sameness: Comus desires Lady Virtue as Queen of Nature. Longing for the supernatural to be expressed naturally, instinctively, temporally 3⁄4 microcosmically 3⁄4 he wishes to transform her azurean deep and empyrean sleep. To Comus, Lady Chastity, his radical and supreme other,29 is as heavenly and absolute as he is earthly and mutable. The stability of his universe depends on this Apollonian-Dionysian liaison, where wine and magic must be abundantly poured divinely to inebriate the other to denude to ecstatic radiance, the twice erotic: the banquet and feast between two lovers, duality becoming one.30 Oneness in the twice erotic negated by Lady Chastity’s heavenward gaze,31 a
29 Paz, Octavio. La Llama Doble. Barcelona: Seix Barrall, 1993. 20
30 Paz, Octavio. La Llama Doble. Barcelona: Seix Barrall, 1993. 23
31 The gaze of Lady Chastity is always oriented towards the Platonic heaven. The idea of Plato is that education must be oriented towards turning the gaze of the soul from ignorance and dark towards the light of understanding, from false
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