Assignment 1: 1500 word Commentary

Deadline: 12th November 2017

One copy to be submitted via QM+

 He is now in bed with me the first time, and in broad day; but when thrusting up
his own shirt and my shift, he laid his naked glowing body to mine oh!
insupportable delight! oh! superhuman rapture! What pain could stand before a
pleasure so transporting? I felt no more the smart of my wounds below; but, curling
5 round him like the tendril of a vine, as if I feared any part of him should be untouched
or unpressed by me, I returned his strenuous embraces and kisses with a fervour and
gust only known to true love, and which mere lust could never rise to.
Yes, even at this time, that all the tyranny of the passions is fully over and that my
veins roll no longer but a cold tranquil stream, the remembrance of those passages
10 that most affected me in my youth still cheers and refreshes me. Let me proceed then -
my beauteous youth was now glued to me in all the folds and twists that we could
make our bodies meet in: when no longer able to rein in the fierceness of refreshed
desires, he gives his steed the head, and, gently insinuating his thighs between mine,
stopping my mouth with kisses of humid fire, makes a fresh irruption, and renewing
15 his thrusts, pierces, tears, and forces his way up the torn tender folds of the sheath that
yielded him admission with a smart little less severe than when the breach was first
made. I stifled, however, my cries, and bore him with the passive fortitude of an
heroine; soon his thrusts, more and more furious, cheeks flushed with a deeper scarlet,
his eyes turned up in the fervent fit and rolling nothing but their whites, some dying
20 sighs and an agonizing shudder, announced the approaches of that ecstatic pleasure I
was yet in too much pain to come in for my share of.
Nor was it till after a few enjoyments had numbed and blunted the sense of the
smart, and given me to feel the titillating inspersion of balsamic sweets, drew from me
the delicious return, and brought down all my passion, that I arrived at excess of
25 pleasure through excess of pain; but when successive engagements had broken and
inured me, I began to enter into the true unallayed relish of that pleasure of pleasures,
when the warm gush darts through all the ravished inwards. What floods of bliss!
what melting transports! what agonies of delight! too fierce, too mighty for nature to
sustain: well has she therefore, no doubt, provided the relief of a delicious momentary
30 dissolution, the approaches of which are intimated by a dear delirium, a sweet thrill,
on the point of emitting those liquid sweets in which enjoyment itself is drowned,
when one gives the languishing stretch-out and dies at the discharge.
How often, when the rage and tumult of my senses has subsided after the melting
flow, have I, in a tender meditation, asked myself coolly the question, if it was in
35 nature for any of its creatures to be so happy as I was? Or, what were all the fears of
my future fate, put in the scale of one nights enjoyment of anything so transcendently
the taste of my eyes and heart, as that delicious, fond, matchless youth?
(Cleland, Fanny Hill)