Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/51

 Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start Of married flowers to either side outspread From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red, Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams, And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away. Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day; Till from some wonder of new woods and streams He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay."

This, then, is "the golden affluence of words, the firm outline, the justice and chastity of form." Here is a full-grown man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on record, for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a desire to reproduce the sensual mood, so careful a choice of epithet to convey mere animal sensations, that we merely shudder at the shameless nakedness. I am no purist in such matters. I hold the sensual part of our nature to be as holy as the spiritual or intellectual part, and I believe that such things must find their equivalent in art; but it is neither poetic, nor manly, nor even human, to obtrude such things as the themes of whole poems. It is simply nasty. Nasty as it is, we are very mistaken if many readers do not think it nice. What says the author of "A Scourge for Paper Persecutors," in 1625, of similar literature?—

Fine wit is shown therein, but finer 'twere If not attired in such bawdy geare; But be it as it will, the coyest dames In private read it for their closet games!"