Gay gods and merry mortals: some excursions in verse — A Closer Reading

A Proem That Sets the Rules

The Proem functions as both apology and advertisement. Shores announces that his book “relates” ancient tales while explaining how gods “displayed their human traits.” He compares his jingles to those of the poet Saxe and admits that some Homeric anecdotes are missing because they “would never pass the mails to-day.” The final couplet declares the collection “slightly expurgated,” a joke that frames the entire work: Shores will flirt with risqué material while maintaining a veneer of propriety. This opening establishes the poet as a self-conscious mediator between antique sources and a modern, presumably American, audience.

Recurring Images: Nudity, Hunting, and the Unexpected Glimpse

Several poems hinge on a character being seen unclothed or in a state of undress. In “Actæon,” the hunter stumbles upon Diana in her bath; the poem dwells on what he saw (“what he wore when he was born”) and on the goddess’s hurried attempt to cover herself. “Adonis” opens with Cupid being spanked, and the narrative later involves Venus’s “evening leaf.” “Daphne” describes a maiden who “would not flirt / Her dainty little hunting skirt.” Hunting itself appears as a framing device: Actæon pursues the Chase, Daphne devotes her days “unto the Chase,” and the chase of love is a persistent metaphor. These recurring elements—bodies exposed, garments shed or clung to, the hunt as both literal and erotic—give the collection a cohesive visual and thematic thread.

Movement Between Mortal and Divine Realms

Shores’s poems often begin in a mortal setting and then pivot to divine intervention, or vice versa. In “Actæon,” a mortal hunter stumbles into a goddess’s bath; in “Adonis,” a divine quarrel (Cupid spanked by Jove) sets off a chain of events that ends with Adonis’s death. “Dido” moves from the mortal queen’s flight from Tyre to her encounter with the semi-divine Aeneas. The transitions are abrupt, signaled by line breaks or shifts in tone. Shores uses these jumps to create comic incongruity: a goddess donning her crescent “in great haste” is followed by a mortal’s banal question about soap. The effect is to collapse the distance between Olympus and everyday life, making the gods seem petty and the mortals foolish.

Self-Aware Morals and Ironic Closure

Each poem ends with a moral couplet or stanza, but Shores often undermines the lesson. In “Actæon,” the moral warns against “conversation, if uncouth,” but the preceding joke (the Pear’s Soap gag) is itself uncouth. In “Dido,” the poet flatly states, “The Moral? This is not a moral tale,” then offers a pun on “cutting didoes.” The morals in “Adonis” and “Daphne” are similarly flippant. This pattern suggests that Shores is less interested in instruction than in the pleasure of deflating expectations. The morals function as punchlines, not precepts, and they reinforce the collection’s tone of knowing irreverence.

Readers will find that the poems reward attention to Shores’s wordplay and his manipulation of meter. The rhymes are often deliberately strained, and the anachronisms are placed with care. Because the excerpts cover only about half the collection, the full range of mythological figures and comic strategies remains to be discovered. The book is best read as a sequence, noting how Shores varies his approach from poem to poem while maintaining a consistent, sardonic voice.

Sometimes I catch myself smiling at how freely Gay Gods and Merry Mortals lets its myths breathe, all that laughter softening the old solemnities. It reminded me, strangely, of another quiet pleasure — the way The Lay of the Sheriff — Story, Setting & Ideas lingers on its own rustic corners without hurry. Both feel like evening company, unbothered by proving anything.