Ancient Greece has Elegant Variations for the Beast with Two Backs.

Since that which Helen did and ended Troy . . .*

Apart from drawing on the limitless resources of a first class scholar-brain, poet Robert Graves in his Greek Myths (1955) is a master of the the Elegant Variation (i.e. the ‘practice of never using the same word twice in the same sentence or passage,’ according to Fowler), in this instance the reluctance of Graves’s poetic impulse to repeat the verbing of the act of coitus. Yet it’s a unique effect achieved by him in blunt worldly English prose. And in his poetry, too, these characteristic soldierly conceits in plainest English may be observed and relished. 

 

A typical bravura performance is Graves’s cautionary verse, Down, Wanton, Down! where he writes, ‘Love may be blind, but Love at least / Knows what is man and what mere beast . . . ’  There’s no cheap innuendo but the wit of a would-be lover laying siege to his intended and ‘. . . sworn to reach / The ravelin and effect a breach . . .’

 

A shaving mirror Heracles.

These examples of Graves’s poetic facility are as inventive as the seducer Zeus’s metamorphosing deceptions. Zeus, libidinous son of a Titan, and husband to his sister, Hera, is a shape-shifting lover to innumerable ensnared victims with whom he ‘consorts’. And, of course, we may imagine Graves’s identification with Olympian gods and heroes is the more intense for his resemblance to Heracles, son of Zeus and legendary lover,  for surely the similarity did not escape his notice each time he regarded his own flattened nose in his shaving mirror (‘Crookedly broken nose – low tackling caused it . . .’) 

 

Heracles . . . bellicose warrior with flattened nose.

 

Fifty nights of Herculean bed-hopping.

Doubtless, the resemblance did not end at Graves’s nose. Graves’s identification with the legendary Heracles/Hercules can be measured by the zest with which the poet relates Hercules’s Thirteenth Labour: ‘Heracles lodged at Thespiaie for fifty nights running.’ Thespius, king of Thespiae, ‘. . . had fifty daughters’ [and] ‘fearing that they might make unsuitable matches, he determined that every one of them should have a child by Heracles . . . Some say, however, that he enjoyed them all in a single night . . . ’

 

(Note: Lest the charge of flippancy be levelled against me for these musings on the fate of women at the hands of those who return triumphant from the martial field, please refer to the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 and certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of the previous year. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/09/correction-notice-soviet-weekly-january.html

 

So, for your interest, here then are itemised the robust demotic verbing Robert Graves (a venerated WW1 combatant) deploys in his Myths, though it’s entirely possible there are other not dissimilar usages in his masterly and soldierly despatches of salacious goings-on reported from the Heights of Olympus I have regrettably overlooked.

bed with

bedded

begot on her

caught at last and got with child

[with whom] he companied 

couple with

courted by

covered her

do as he pleased with her

enjoyed each other

tried to force her

[woman is] no more than an inert furrow

[in which] the husbandsman plants his seed

[with whom] he lay for nine nights

lay together

forced her to lie with him

forcibly married

mounted

on whom he begot

outrage her

taken to wife

took his pleasure (cf. verb pleasure)

touched her to some purpose

trod her triumphantly (Zeus in guise of swan)

ravished her

violated her

violent love made to her

had his will of 

yielded to embraces

 

 

*Sonnet VI by Edna St. Vincent Millay.