simonfeatherstone
the humid carnage’, to float free, grammatically unanchored and tonally ambiguous.
‘[C]arnage’seems to hold to its archaic definition of mingled bodies (Loy was
never without an etymological dictionary, it often seems), and hence prompts an
erotic solution to gendered opposition and ‘suspicion’ (the ‘suspect places’ of sexual
relationships). But it also alerts us to the real war that surrounds and infects the poem
and its subjects, the queasy description of sex acting as a reminder of the hospital
where, Loy said, she enjoyed being ‘among the blood & mess’. ‘Human’ carnage is
displaced to become ‘humid carnage’, sex offering both a disturbing reminder of
slaughter elsewhere and a celebration of the intensity and authenticity of sweating,
desiringbodies(thesequenceasawholenever losesitsappreciationofsuchcarnality,
no matter how cynical its attitude might otherwise seem). But war, for the first time,
has been explicitly brought to bed. The song acknowledges that its horrors—and
its perverse attractions—have entered and shaped sexual relationships.
The fusion of modern war and modern sex is intensified by the sequence’s
recurring references to conception. As Paul Peppis has argued, Loy’s demands for
women’s sexual freedom always took place in a context of what he terms ‘the ideal
of free loving maternalism’.^16 In ‘Songs to Joannes’ this aspiration is expressed, but
seems disturbingly thwarted. The fourth song presents a nightmarish vision of ‘an
unimaginable family’, ‘Bird-like abortions|With human throats|And Wisdom’s
eyes’. One of these owlish abortions is itself carrying a baby ‘In a padded porte-
enfant|Tied with a sarsenet ribbon|To her goose’s wings’ in a grotesque parody
of Mother Goose, that sentimental evasion of the ‘carnage’ of sex and childbirth.
‘I would have lived|Among their fearful furniture|To teach them to tell me
their secrets’, the poem goes on, an admission, perhaps, of the temptations of the
bourgeois family, ‘Before I guessed|—Sweeping the brood clean out’.^17 Quite what
is guessed is unclear, though the contrast between the egotistical demands of sexual
desire and the social consequences of productive sex and settled relationships is a
favourite theme of Loy’s work. She is always alert to the contradictions of an urgent
sexual desire that produces children in a context of the conventions of family and
child-bearing that then go on to frustrate the sources of that desire. In the previous
lyric there is a moment of wistfulness when the speaker ponders that ‘We might
have given birth to a butterfly’. Characteristically, though, this musing is rapidly
qualified by an image that heralds the avian abortions of the next song. The butterfly
has ‘the daily news|Printed in blood on its wings’; it is not free and natural, but
a marked, damaged thing. Such ‘daily news’ seems to be in direct conflict with the
possibility of sexual desire being both fulfilling and life-giving; the blood of war’s
casualties transforms the child-butterfly into the aborted bird-Cupid of Song IV.
Loy had long connected the experience of pregnancy with such rhetoric of war.
During an unhappy confinement in 1908, she wrote of her body as ‘given up
(^16) Paul Peppis, ‘Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology’,modernism/modernity,9/4
(2002), 571.
(^17) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, 54–5.