I.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Impossible, unnatural; a knight
can’t ask for that. No blushing heroine
could love a stooping, groveling Gawain.
Mon Dieu! She’d shriek with laughter at the sight,

summoning all her maids, who’d point and taunt,
and tell the world your secret. In her eyes
you’d be grotesque, a clown with a disease.
Some things it’s just ridiculous to want.

To go on wanting hurts a little less
at any given moment, a slow flame
under the spit you’ll die on, in due time.
So hush. It would be madness to confess.

II. Algernon Swinburne

In the heart of Hermaphroditus,
      Where the hawk is at one with the dove,
Contradictions that shock and delight us
      Are joined in a curious love.
In the virtuous mouth of a devil,
      A curse and a kiss are the same,
So an innocent sinner may revel
      In glorious shame.

In the brilliance of gold that is beaten,
      In the wrath of a merciful god,
In the noble traditions of Eton,
      In the serpent that rose from the rod,
May be found a contrarian beauty
      That appeals to poetical men
Who respond to its call, as to duty,
      Again and again.

III. Percy Grainger

Some folks are strangely strung,
tuned to the low note’s snap and quiver,
fond of songs with a sharper flavor,
licks that burn the tongue.

They love the echoing
of conga drums and booming basses,
shivering skins that hardwood kisses,
rhythm in full swing.

Each beat’s a heartfelt thing.
The cymbal as it sways and hisses,
wailing sax and bellowing brasses,
summon up some pang

experienced when young,
some chord too often struck, forever
played in the bloodstream, over and over,
wordless but well sung.

IV. Lawrence of Arabia

I know a guilty tribe condemned to roam
forever in the Wilderness of Zin,
not Jews, not Bedouin,
not free to leave and never quite at home.

No savior makes them pay for what they’ve done.
They live to starve, and only eat what’s bitter;
they love to drink hard water
and labor in the brutal desert sun.

Their crime’s forgotten now. That hardly matters
to sinners of their stripe, who pay and pay
and still can’t walk away,
preferring to remain eternal debtors.

V. C. S. Lewis

God, for our own good, is sometimes cruel,
letting blood from the sacrificial lamb,
whether on the front lines at the Somme
or an English school.

His love is fearsome, irresistible:
a love that draws us to its cleansing flame
against our will, until our souls succumb
to its urgent pull.