Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/381



How shall we utter This horror, this rage, this despair? How shall we strike at baseness, Cut through disgust with scorn? How rend with slashed fingers The bars and walls of their lives Which blacken our air and pure light?

What are they? Alien, brutish, Base seed of Earth’s ravished womb; Shall we yield our light and our truth— The flash of the helm And the foam-grey eyes and the hair Braided with gold, Steel mail on a firm breast? Shall we yield?

Their life, their truth? O laugh of disdain! If ours be a goddess, Chaste, proud, and austere; What is theirs? A boastful woman, a whore, Whose vice is most stupid, most foul; One greasy of flesh, stale With hot musty perfume— While ours— Firm-fleshed as the treeless hills With her rigid breasts and hard thighs, Cold and perfect and fresh— Fields crisp with new frost—