De planctu naturae

I turn laughter into tears, joys into weeping, applause into lament, jests into tearful things, when I see nature falling silent about her own mysteries, when the shipwrecked crowd perishes by Venus's monster. When Venus fights against Venus, making "hims" into "hers," and by magic art unmans her own men. No deceit gives birth to this sadness, no fraud to this weeping, no trick to this grief; rather, sorrow itself labors, sorrow itself gives birth. The Muse asks it, grief itself commands it, nature begs it, that I grant them, in weeping, a song fit for weeping. Alas! Where has the grace of nature withdrawn? Where the form of morals, the standard of chastity, the love of modesty? Nature weeps, morals are silent, and all shame, orphaned from its ancient nobility, is outlawed. The active gender shudders shamefully to see itself degenerate so into the passive gender. Man made woman blackens the honor of his sex, the art of magic Venus turns him hermaphrodite. He is both predicate and subject, becoming one double term, stretching the laws of grammar too far. He denies he is a man, made by art into a barbarism against nature. The art does not please him; rather, the figure of speech does. Yet this transformation cannot be called a figure of speech; this figure falls better under the name of vice. Here is a kind of logician, through whom a simple conversion of art makes the laws of nature perish. He hammers on an anvil that coins no seed, and the hammer itself recoils from its own anvil. No idea marks any matter for the womb, but rather the plow furrows a barren shore. So, in the dactylic foot, the practice of Venus is badly turned to iambs, in which the long syllable will not tolerate the short. Although every form of male beauty pleads before the feminine kind, always lesser in honor than she; though a face be shaped like Helen's, though the beauty of Adonis and the grace of Narcissus, conquered, might adore her: still she herself is spurned, though that beauty might plead its case and argue that the divinity of its form makes it a goddess, before whom the thunderbolt would grow faint in Jove's right hand, and every sinew of Phoebus, however active, would cease its labors; before whom the free man would become a slave, and Hippolytus himself would sell his own chastity, delighting in her love. Lips once pressed to hers would grow sweet with honeyed juice, and would give back honeyed kisses, a honeycomb upon the mouth. The spirit, given over to kissing, would leave through the mouth, and would play entirely upon the lips, lost in itself, so that, while thus I die, dead in myself, in her I might, as another self, enjoy that happy life. Not only does the Phrygian adulterer hunt for Helen, but Paris breeds unspeakable monsters within Paris himself. Not only does Pyramus search through cracks for Thisbe's kisses; no little crack of Venus pleases this man. Not only does the son of Peleus feign a maiden's ways, so as to prove himself a maidenly man; but he wrongly gives nature's gift in place of its true purpose, when he sells his sex for the love of gain. Such men deserve to be cast out from the temple of Genius, who deny to Genius his tithes and his due rights.