Semele
Not for naught did he naughty seem
God's love was the manciple's dream
For vision divine she'd duly die
Bacchus sewn in Jupiter's thigh
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Came across the bizarre story of Bacchus' birth in a footnote in the Penguin edition of Spenser's
The Faerie Queene. His mother, Semele, died after seeing Zeus in his real lightning-blasting form--Hera tricked her into asking him to do that--so Zeus took their unborn child, who would become the god Bacchus (aka Dionysus), and carried him to term inside his thigh. :o
The romance came up in
Faerie Queene as part of a long list of kinky mythological love stories--Zeus was in the form of an eagle when he became enamored with Semele--leading up to "The Masque of Cupid" in book 3, which is a moral allegory on chastity. "Manciple" is a nifty old word Spenser used elsewhere in the poem; it was the starting point of this poem (oh no wait, first the not-naught-naughty thing popped into my head), which then added on the thigh-sewing thing that I guess had left an impression on me, and somehow gradually became a poem about Semele--who ended up fitting nicely into the "manciple" role, since she was a priestess of Zeus (Jupiter/Jove etc). Ah serendipity.
I squeezed the letters divided by apostrophe's a little closer together; by default they come out pretty widely spaced in Clarisse~.
