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Perhaps few individuals in the modern West have succeeded in developing a spirituality that binds together their experience of the Christian God and boylove--or at any rate, few have left any public testimony to it. But there was at least one figure in Dutch literature within this century, a portion of whose work can be seen as an effort to do precisely that. That was Willem de Mérode--born Willem Eduard Keuning (1887-1939), but who, as remains common in Dutch literature to this day, adopted a pseudonym for his writing. Unfortunately very little of his work--and none of his boylove poems--has been published in English translation.
Commonly regarded as the most important Dutch Calvinist poet of his generation, De Mérode had a bent for mysticism that in many ways would have been more at home in Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it might have been still even more at home in Sufism. In his second collection of poems, De overgave (Surrender, 1919), De Mérode carefully uses neutral pronouns so that in many of the poems, as in Sufi poems, one is never quite sure whether the surrender is of man to God, or a man to his female beloved or, as his subsequent history showed, a man to a beloved boy. In addition to the more conventional religious poetry their titles would lead one to expect, some poems in his next two collections, Het heilig licht (Holy light) and Het kostbaar bloed (Precious blood; both 1922), continue to explore such themes.
As its title indicates, his long poem Ganymedes (Ganymede, 1924) was entirely devoted to the theme of boy-love. De Mérode had worked on it for years, and portions had appeared in his first collection, Gestalten en Stemmingen (Forms and Moods, 1916) and in De overgave. It was finally published separately in a bibliophile edition while he was in prison on molestation charges which arose when his relations with two boys were discovered after he was placed under police surveillance because of his contacts with another homophile poet whose behaviour was much more blatant. (As a footnote to this, it is worth noting that at a 1987 celebration of the centenary of De Mérode's birth, one of the boys whose statements, obtained under police interrogation, had been the basis for De Mérode's conviction sixty years before, went public for the first time to read some of the poems for which he had been the inspiration as a young teenager, and to reaffirm his respect for De Mérode.)
In his Kwattrijnen (Quatrains, 1923) De Mérode actually turns to that classic Eastern verse form to explore the dual paths, sensual and spiritual, to mystic union with the divine. In Kwattrijnen, and later, in De rozenhof (The rose garden, 1925), the first book of poems published after his release from prison, he characterizes these paths as the red rose (the sensual and erotic) and the white rose (abstention and renunciation)--both of which, he clearly affirms, bloom in God's garden. In De rozenhof, written while he was in prison, De Mérode personally renounces the former:
Vrijmoedig heb ik in Uw tuin gedwaald,
De schoonste rozen heb ik stout gehaald.
O't droomen van hun donkerroode zoetheid!
Helaas, helaas, ik heb ze duur betaald.
[Open-hearted I have wandered in Your garden,
The most beautiful roses I have boldly plucked.
O, the dreams of their dark red sweetness!
Alas, alas, I have paid dearly for them.]
De Mérode likely never again had a physical relationship with any of the boys whom he regarded as "the acme of God's creation, the growing boy in the blush of youth, in the brief, quickly fading bloom of [their] beauty," as P.J. Meertens, an acquaintance and correspondent of De Mérode, put it in his Introduction to the study Willem de Mérode (Letterkundig Museum, 1973). However, while De Mérode acknowledged the guilt of his specific sexual actions to the elders of his church, he refused their demand that he repudiate a non-sexualized love for boys in principle, and also refused to publicly confess his "sins," preferring to accept expulsion from the church in 1925, rather than do so. He never again joined another congregation.
It is obvious from others of his poems that even while exploring and singing the path of the "red rose," De Mérode had felt internal moral conflict about it. Remorse for sin and a claim on God's answer to sin, the Gospel of redemption, clearly had been themes in his work from the start, well before his arrest. It was this sense of sin, almost certainly stemming from a long-standing general conflict with society with regard to his sexuality as well as specifically from his prison experience, and the assurance of grace through the precious blood shed by Christ on the cross, which ultimately kept De Mérode spiritually in strictly orthodox Calvinism, despite some investigations of Catholicism in the early 1920s.
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