Ariadne Awaits Dionysus

Ariadne Awaits Dionysus

 

How I long for this divine androgyne

after all that muscle and bluster.

 

Give me skin smooth as a grape,

supple limbs, a torso like alabaster;

 

I’ll be his most devoted Maenad –

I’ll coax favours from him – master

 

of satyrs, with his stalk of fennel

adrip with honey; soft thruster

 

of a different kind of sword. I’m

ripe and ready. Come here, mister.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. After the warrior Theseus, the slayer of the Minotaur, abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos, she precipitately married the god of grapes, wine-making, ritual madness and ecstasy, Dionysus – and does not appear to have regretted her decision. The later iconographic tradition depicts Dionysus as an androgynous youth carrying a staff of fennel, but his female devotees were homicidal, ferocious and highly-sexed, and his male followers were virile satyrs. In some traditions, Theseus was not culpably forgetful, but was ordered by Dionysus to abandon Ariadne, and his memories of her were wiped clean as he sailed away from Naxos. The picture is a life-drawing, 1st February, 2013.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNhbiBUvZXM

 

Done