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A deep-counselled girl, having . . ] me. . This girl . . grace ... C. Meter: Nine-line stanza. Lines 1, 7, 8 dactylic; 2, 3, 4 trochaic; 5, 9 aeolic (choriambic). ” The poem evokes the epiphany of the goddess, who materializes, smiles, and speaks words of power. 5 10 15 Ποικιλ θρον’ iθανbτ’ ’Aφρ διτα, πα Δgο δολ πλοκε, λgσσομαg σε, μx μ’ hσαισι μηδ’ νgαισι δbμνα, π τνια, θ μον, Immortal Aphrodite of the exquisite throne, wile-weaving child of Zeus, to you I pray. Don’t subdue with pains and torments, lady, my heart.

All of these are common in comedy; the iambic is associated with invective and burlesque, the cretic and trochaic with vigorous movement. Euripides Medea 465–519 When Jason went to Colchis to bring back the Golden Fleece, Medea, the king’s daughter, helped him with her magic, and then fled with him, murdering and dismembering her brother to distract her father from his pursuit. Subsequently, she tricked the daughters of Pelias into killing their father by a grisly death, thinking they were going to make him young again.

The use of the word “die” for sexual climax, a common poetic metaphor in English literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Oxford English Dictionary’s examples show (see definition 7d, OED, under the verb “die”). See Jensen, The Earliest Portuguese Lyrics 266–68; Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry cxiv–cxv. See, respectively, her book Woman as Image and her article “Male Fantasy and Female Reality”; here, 67. , 3–4, and 67, n. 8. Bruckner believes it is important not to deny the existence of women poets, but agrees with Huchet that the woman’s voice can be used as a vehicle for alternative opinion.