The Pompadour in Art: IV

The flesh has no expression in the mind
Unless it be shot through with subtle thought.
An honest wife is all too easily bought,
A ten-stone animal that's deaf and blind,
Who dresses plainly, plainly cooks, is kind—
And knows her husband's income to a nought;
Wears calico, flat shoes, is heard to snort
At vice, but knows not virtue or mankind;
A cow, a bitch, a sense-dulled lump of clay
Were virtuous as she, for art as ripe;
And in her sense's flesh-dimmed, feeble ray
Her husband is a thing who smokes a pipe—
Such is the wife, das Weib, die deutsche Frau,
Formed to stir clay, but only with the plough.