The Art of the Flemings

I.

Art of the Flemings, thou didst know them, thou,
Who well didst love them, wenches big of bone,
With ruddy teats, and bodies like flowers blown;
Thy proudest masterpieces tell us how.

Whether a goddess glimmers from thy painting,
Or nymphs with dripping hair a shepherd sees
Rising among the lonely irides,
Or sailors to the sirens' kisses fainting,

Or females with full contours symbolizing
The seasons beautiful, O glorious Art,
These are the Masteries love-born in thy heart,
The wenches of thy colours' gormandizing.

And to create their bodies' carnal splendour,
Naked, and fat, and unashamed, thy brush
Under their clear and glossy skin made blush
A fire of unimagined colours tender.

They were a focussed light that flashed and glinted;
Their eyes were kindled at the stars, and on
Thy canvases their bosoms rose and shone,
Like great bouquets of flesh all rosy-tinted.

Sweating with love they rolled about a clearing
'Mid in the wood, or bathed their feet in springs,
While in the thickets full of noise of wings,
Satyrs were prowling and through branches leering,

And hid their legs, salacious, shagged, distorted;
Their eyes, like sparks holing the darkness, lit
Some leafy corner, their long mouths were slit
With greasy smiles, their lustful nostrils snorted,

Till, dogs in rut, they leapt to their bitches; these
Feign flight, and shiver coldly, blushing roses,
Pushing the satyr off the part that closes,
Squeezing their thighs together under his knees.

And some, by madness more than his ignited,
Rounding their naked haunches, and rich flesh
Of glorious croups beneath a showering mesh
Of golden hair, to wild assaults invited.

II.

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.