The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language. They are in complementary opposition. Language – sound that carries meanings, a material trace that denotes non-material things – is able to give a name to what is most fleeting and evanescent: sensation. Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor. The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor. The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme is a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because its operation is erotic to begin with. Likewise eroticism is a metaphor of animal sexuality. What does this metaphor say? Like all metaphors, it points to something that is beyond the reality that gave rise to it, something new and different from the terms that it comprises. If Góngora says “blood-red snowfall”, he invents or discovers a reality that, though containing both, is neither blood nor snow. The same happens with eroticism; it says, or, rather, it is, something different from mere sexuality.