Erotic panegyric

Statius is a Roman poet who wrote several fascinating panegyrics of the Roman emperor Domitian.  The one I know best opens a collection of poems called Silvae, occasional pieces Statius wrote for patrons and friends.  Dedicated to praising an enormous new equestrian sculpture of the emperor, it sews references to the statue's enormous, almost monstrous, size together with admiring commentary on the gentle grace of Domitian's expression and gesture.  The effect is sensual, slightly comical, and (for a poem about an autocrat) oddly humanizing.  

I thought of Silvae 1.1 when I read this erotic panegyric by Jonathan Galassi on the plane to Amsterdam last month. It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title "Tom in Rome." Its tone of rueful infatuation rings truer than most. 


Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.

You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe:
chaste Carrara, blue-veined Parian,
hand-warmed Pentelic when you buck and writhe
more contorted than Laocoön,
diminutive fine subtle lordship, master-
work surpassing alabaster,
as I am tufa to your travertine.

Go ahead and shame us in the Forum
with your ironic fine decorum, do:
Antinous with glasses and umbrella,
deus ex machina of the novella
whose story was that my roads led to you.