You with the life with which yourselves abounded
Conceived them, masters dear to fame, with red
Brutalities of blood upon them shed,
The bodies of your beauties richly rounded.
No pallid women sunk in listless poses
Morosely on your canvases are seen,
As the moon's face shimmers in waters green,
Mirroring their phthisis and chlorosis,
With foreheads sad as is the day's declining,
Sad as a dolorous music faints and dies,
With heavy-lidded, sick and glassy eyes,
In which consumption and despair are pining,
And false, affected grace of bodies faded
Upon the sofas where their time they pass,
In scented dressing-gowns of taffetas,
And in chemises with a dear lace braided.
Nothing your brushes knew of painted faces,
Nor of indecency, nor of the nice
Hints of a cunning and perverted vice
Which with its winking eye our art debases,
Nor of the pedlar Venuses whose draping
Of curtains of the cushioned chamber hints,
Nor corners of a venal flesh that glints
In nests out of the low-necked dress escaping,
Pricking, suggestive themes you knew not, faintings
Of shepherdesses in false pastorals,
No, nor voluptuous beds in hollow walls--
The pulsing women, masters, of your paintings,
In landscapes bright, or waited on by pages
Crimsonly clad in panelled halls with gold,
Or in the purple sumptuousness unrolled
Of the god-guarded, mellow classic ages,
Your women sweated health; they were serenely
Crimson with blood, and white with corpulence;
Ruts they did hold in leashed obedience,
And led them at their heels with gesture queenly.