If Sidney flirts with male lesbianism in the frisson-laden antics of the Arcadia, and if Shakespeare develops its radical potential in the feminine identifications of A Lover's Complaint, then Donne seems to face it full on in Sapho to Philaenis where, as if impatient with any coy hints or innuendos, he sweeps away all concessionary narrative frames and writes what is generally acknowledged to be the first unambiguously lesbian love poem in English. The poem would invite inspection on those grounds alone: what positively forces it on our attention, however, is the sheer unlikelihood that it should have been Donne who wrote it. For the poem obliges us to square its passionate utterance of female homosexual longing with a poet who is otherwise known – in the estimation of his modern readers no less than in that of his contemporaries – as a byword for phallic masculinity. This is the poet, after all, whose speaker more commonly asserts an insistent heterosexuality; who claims it is ‘the greatest Staine to mans estate / … to be calld effeminat’ (unless, that is, ‘effeminat’ is redefined to describe a man who loves ‘womens ioyes’, one, that is, who is actively heterosexual); and who rejects the ‘softnesses of Love’ that Dryden considered more suitable for amorous verse for an implicitly ‘hard’ philosophizing and for harsh rhythms that batter the ear of reader and addressee with what he styles his words’ own ‘masculine persuasive force’.