The Music-Hall

Under the enormous fog
Whose wings the city arteries clog,
'Mid ringing plaudits, at the back
Of a radiant hall their Orients they unpack.

The acrobat on airy trestles poises;
Great suns of strass shine o'er the scene;
Clashing their fists stand cymbal-players, lean
Breakers of cries and noises;

And when the ballet-corps with painted faces
In a thicket of perplexing steps appear,
Tangling and disentangling labyrinthine paces,
The hall, hung with its gorgeous chandelier,
That o'er a surging sea of faces glares,
The hall with heavy velvet clad,
With balconies like pad on pad,
Is like a belly that a woman bares.

Swarming battalions of flesh and thighs
March under arches flowered with thousand dyes;
Lace, petticoats, throats, legs, and hips:
Teams of rut whose breasts, though bridled, yet
Are bounding, yoke by yoke the coiled dance trips,
Blue with paint and raw with sweat.

Hands, vainly opening, seem to seize
Only invisible desire that flees;
A dancer, darting legs her tights leave bare,
Stiffens obscenity in the air;
Another with swimming eyes and flanks that writhe
Shrinks like a trampled beast above the loud
Flare of the footlights swaying with the lithe
Lust of the gloating crowd.

O blasphemy vociferously hurled
In crying gold on the Beauty of the world!
Atrocious feint of Art, while Art sublime
Is lying massacred and sunk in slime!
O noisy pleasure singing as it treads
On tortured ugliness that twists and cries;
Pleasure against Joy's grain that nurtures heads
With alcohol, with alcohol men's eyes;
O pleasure whose rank mouth calls out for flowers,
And vomits the vile ferment it devours!

Pleasure of old, heroic, calm, and bare,
Walked with calm hands and forehead clear as air;
The wind and the sun danced in his heart, he pressed
Divine, harmonious life, to his warm breast;
His breast that breathed it in was Beauty's source;
He knew no law that dared call Beauty coarse;
Sunrise and sunset, springs with mosses grassed,
And the green bough that brushed him as he passed,
Thrilled to his deep soul through his flesh, and were
The kiss of things that love makes lovelier.

Now senile and debauched, he licks and eats
Sin that beguiles him with her poisoned teats;
Now in his garden of anomalies
Bibles, codes, texts, and rules he multiplies,
And ravishes the faith he then denies.
His loves are gold. His hatreds? Flights unto
Beauty that grows still lovelier, still more true,
Opening in starry flowers in heavens blue.
Look where he haunts these halls of monstrous art,
Whose burning windows to the heavens dart
A restlessness by gazing still renewed:
Here is the beast transformed to a multitude.

Filled with contagion thousand eyes deflect
To find a million more they may infect;
One mind to thousands casts its brazier fire,
To be consumed the more in sick desire,
To breed new vices, unimagined Hell.
The conscience changes, and the brain as well;
Another race is bred from putrid spawn,
A writhen black totality, a sum
Of ciphers spreading in a weltering scum,
That outrages the healthfulness of Dawn.

O shames and crimes of crowds that reek and stain
The city like a bellowing hurricane;
Gulfed in the plaster boxes tier on tier
Of theatres and halls obscene and blear!

The stage is like a fan unfurled.
Enamelled minarets grotesquely curled.
Houses and terraces and avenues.
Under the limelight's changing hues,
First in slow rhythms, then with violent sweep,
Gathering swift kisses, touching breasts that leap,
Meet the Bayaderes with swaying hips;
Negro boys, whose heads with plumes are tipped,
With their foam-coloured teeth in lips
Like a red vulva open ripped,
Move all as pushed along in sluggish poses.
A drum beats, an obstinate horn cries long,
A raw fife tickles a stupid song,
And at the last, for the final apotheosis,
A mad assault over the boards is sweeping,
Gold and throats and thighs in stages heaping
In curled entanglements; and then all closes
With garments splitting offering rounded shapes
And vice half hid in flowers like tempting grapes.

And the orchestra dies, or suddenly halts,
And climbs, and swells, and rolls in whipped assaults;
Out of the violins wriggle spasms dark;
Lascivious dogs in the tempest seem to bark
Of heavy brasses and of strong bassoons;
A manifold desire swells, sickens, swoons,
Revives, and with such heavy violence heaves,
The sense cries out, and helpless reels,
And prostitutes itself to a spasm that relieves.

And midnight peals.
The dense crowd pours and at the doors unfurls.
The hall is closed--and on the black causeways,
Gaudy beneath the gaslamps' leering gaze,
Red in the fog like flesh, await the girls.