While some European poets have faintly indicated the woman’s armpit as a centre of sexual attraction, it is among Eastern poets that we may find the idea more directly and naturally expressed. Thus, in a Chinese drama (“The Transmigration of Yo-Chow,” Mercure de France, no. 8, 1901) we find a learned young doctor addressing the following poem to his betrothed:

When I have climbed to the bushy summit of Mount Chao,
I have still not reached to the level of your odorous armpit.
I must needs mount to the sky
Before the breeze brings to me
The perfume of that embalsamed nest!

This poet seems, however, to have been carried to a pitch of enthusiasm unusual even in China, for his future mother-in-law, after expressing her admiration for the poem, remarks: “But who would have thought one could find so many beautiful things under my daughter's armpit!”

// Перевод и комментарий Хэвлока Эллиса из Studies in the Psychology of Sex (vol. IV, 1905, 80). Выпуск Mercure de France доступен в Gallica.