  THE tents are coloured like a child’s balloons; They swell upon the air like August moons Anchored by waters paler than a pearl; The airs like rain-wet shrinking petals curl Beneath the rainbow lights of noon that fill The open calyx with the faintest thrill, Then break in airy bubbles on the sense Like sounds upheld in exquisite suspense. In grande toilette, and with a parasol Bright-fringÈd as the noonday sun, (that fool Of beauty,) Messalina promenades. A crinoline keeps off the other shades: Her grape-black hair casts shadows deep as death; All curled and high, yet stirring at Time’s breath. The powder on her face is shuddering white As dust of Æons seen in heaven’s light. She leaves the sands, where in tents striped like fruits The dancers whirl like winds to airy flutes, And music, soother than the pulp of pearls Whose sweetness decks the swan-white syren girls, In air-pale waves like water, has the sheen Of mirrors, floats like flower-wing’d stars.—O spleen! Leave Regent’s Park and quit society Only to find this immorality! So now she goes to church, where bonnets steam Like incense, and the painted windows seem Naught but a coloured veil stupidity Had wrought to clothe her dumb soliloquy: “There’s comfort in old age: the steam of food Ascending like the rich man’s soul to God; And little words that crackle as they went, How such and such a life was evil spent, “Until they make a fire to warm our hands. For Time has wrapp’d the heart in swaddling bands, But yet they could not save it from the cold.— The soul’s a pander grown; for she has sold “My body to the Church; does nicely now. Oh! Soul has much to learn from flesh, I vow.” Thus Messalina, grown both old and fat,— The Church’s parrot now, and dull at that! |
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