  At present, partly owing to what is very modestly called “barefoot” dancing, a severe season of clothelessness prevails; and the aforementioned exercises afford the public quite a fair idea of “the most admirable spectacle in nature”—that is to say, bowlegs, knock-knees, thick ankles, spray feet, shoulders scraggy or pudgy, knees bony or lumpy, and weirdly shaped legs. The modernist poets also have been seized by the mania for nudity—but let us hope that with them it is rather theory than practice; for the average literator is not usually “a dream of form in days of thought.” One mocking rhymester thus makes game of such poetic aspirations: All the poets have been stripping, Quaintly into moonbeams slipping, Running out like wild Bacchantes, Minus lingerie and panties. Never knew of such a frantic Belvederean, corybantic, Highty-tighty Aphrodite, Stepping out without a nightie. One of these modernist bards puts her own fancies into the brain of an old-time lady, stiff in pink and silver brocade, as she walks in a prim garden awaiting the coming of her suitor. She would like to leave “all that pink and silver crumpled on the ground”; for, Underneath my stiffened gown Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin. Thus divested of raiment, “I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,” and her lover, seeing her, would pursue “till he caught me in the shade.” A writer of free verse is more candid; it is herself she would disrobe. “Since the earliest days I have dressed myself in fanciful clothes,” she says, trying to express herself in this manner; but now she is weary of putting “romance and fantasy into my raiment.” She realizes that “my clothes are not me, myself”; hence the stern resolve: I think I shall go naked into the streets, And wander unclothed into people’s parlors. The incredulous eyes of the bewildered world Might give me back my true image ... Maybe in the glances of others I would find out what I really am. Doubtless she would; but perhaps not exactly as she means it. Wandering “unclothed into people’s parlors,” if police vigilance could be eluded, might be a way of seeing ourselves as others see us, since the owners of the parlors would probably be startled into candid comment, instead of, as usual, waiting until the unclad back of the visitant was turned. It would be a happy arrangement if only the truly symmetrical would indulge in semi-nudity. Such exhibitions are a form of female vanity; but if the average woman will but realize it, she owes any admiration she may excite to the saving graces of clothes. If she is wise she will foster the illusion. As a poet of another era expressed it, “Oh, the little less, and what worlds away!” |
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