The Decadent was speaking to his soul–
Poor useless thing, he said,
Why did God burden me with such as thou?
The body were enough,
The body gives me all.
The soul’s a sort of sentimental wife
That prays and whimpers of the higher life,
Objects to latch-keys, and bewails the old,
The dear old days, of passion and of dream,
When life was a blank canvas, yet untouched
Of the great painter Sin.
Yet, little soul, thou hast fine eyes,
And knowest fine airy motions,
Hast a voice–
Why wilt thou so devote them to the church?
His face grew strangely sweet–
As when a toad smiles.
He dreamed of a new sin:
An incest ‘twixt the body and the soul.
He drugged his soul, and in a house of sin
She played all she remembered out of heaven
For him to kiss and clip by.
He took a little harlot in his hands,
And she made all his veins like boiling oil,
Then that grave organ made them cool again.
Then from that day, he used his soul
As bitters to the over dulcet sins,
As olives to the fatness of the feast–
She made those dear heart-breaking ecstasies
Of minor chords amid the Phrygian flutes,
She sauced his sins with splendid memories,
Starry regrets and infinite hopes and fears;
His holy youth and his first love
Made pearly background to strange-coloured vice.
Sin is no sin when virtue is forgot.
It is so good in sin to keep in sight
The white hills whence we fell, to measure by–
To say I was so high, so white, so pure,
And am so low, so blood-stained and so base;
I revel here amid the sweet sweet mire
And yonder are the hills of morning flowers;
So high, so low; so lost and with me yet;
To stretch the octave ‘twixt the dream and deed,
Ah, that’s the thrill!
To dream so well, to do so ill,–
There comes the bitter-sweet that makes the sin.
First drink the stars, then grunt amid the mire,
So shall the mire have something of the stars,
And the high stars be fragrant of the mire.
The Decadent was speaking to his soul–
Dear witch, I said the body was enough.
How young, how simple as a suckling child!
And then I dreamed–’an incest ‘twixt the body and the soul:’
Let’s wed, I thought, the seraph with the dog,
And wait the purple thing that shall be born.
And now look round–seest thou this bloom?
Seven petals and each petal seven dyes,
The stem is gilded and the root in blood:
That came of thee.
Yea, all my flowers were single save for thee.
I pluck seven fruits from off a single tree,
I pluck seven flowers from off a single stem,
I light my palace with the seven stars,
And eat strange dishes to Gregorian chants:
All thanks to thee.
But the soul wept with hollow hectic face,
Captive in that lupanar of a man.
And I who passed by heard and wept for both,–
The man was once an apple-cheek dear lad,
The soul was once an angel up in heaven.
O let the body be a healthy beast,
And keep the soul a singing soaring bird;
But lure thou not the soul from out the sky
To pipe unto the body in the sty.
