The Venus of Milo

O peerless marble marvel! what of grace,
Or matchless symmetry is not enshrined
In thy rare contours! Could we hope to find
The regal dignity of that fair face
In aught less beautiful? We would retrace,
At sight of thee, our willing steps where wind
The paths great Homer trod. Within whose mind
Wast thou a dream, O Goddess? Nearer pace
Brave Hector, reckless Paris, as we gaze;
Then stately temples, fluted colonnades
Rise in their sculptured beauty. Yes! ’tis Greece,
With all the splendor of her lordliest days,
That comes to haunt us: ere the glory fades
Let Fancy bid the rapture never cease.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 11, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“The Venus of Milo” first appeared in Henrietta Cordelia Ray’s collection Poems (The Grafton Press, 1910). As Heidi Morse, lecturer in the department of Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan, writes in “Black Classical Ruins and American Memory in the Poetry of H. Cordelia Ray,” published in Legacy vol. 34, no. 1 (2017), Ray’s Italian sonnet to the famed sculpture of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, “brings into play an implicit tension between the idealized female form of the Venus and the ‘symmetry’ and ‘contours’ of the traditional European sonnet, which itself is strongly associated with women’s bodily objectification [. . .]. While deploying the sonnet’s formal structure, Ray invokes and then disrupts its traditionally gendered gaze. [. . .] [T]he [B]lack female poet displaces Venus’s commercialized, racialized, and sexualized American appropriations and becomes a direct witness to and inheritor of Greece’s ‘glory.’”