Camma
Camma - meaning Summary
Classical Desire and Performance
The speaker contrasts a cool, reverent admiration of an idealized, statue-like beloved with a craving for vivid, performative passion. He muses before classical imagery—Artemis, Grecian urns and Egyptian spectacles—torn between preserving an unmoving beauty and unleashing theatrical, ruinous love like Antony and Cleopatra. The poem stages desire as a choice between aesthetic distance and dangerous, worldly intensity, preferring living drama over passive adoration.
Read Complete AnalysesAs one who poring on a Grecian urn Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made, God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid, And for their beauty's sake is loth to turn And face the obvious day, must I not yearn For many a secret moon of indolent bliss, When in the midmost shrine of Artemis I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern? And yet--methinks I'd rather see thee play That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery Made Emperors drunken,--come, great Egypt, shake Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay, I am grown sick of unreal passions, make The world thine Actium, me thine Antony!
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