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I. IMPERIA
A sculptor showed to me one day / A hand, a Cleopatra's lure, / Or an Aspasia's, cast in clay, / Of masterwork a fragment pure.
Seized in a snowy kiss, and fair / As lily in the argent rise / Of dawn, like whitest poem there / Its beauty lay before mine eyes,
Bright in its pallor lustreless, / Reposing on a velvet bed, / Its fingers, weighted with their dress / Of jewels, delicately spread.
A little parted lay the thumb, / Showing the undulating line, / Beautiful, graceful, subtlesome, / Of its proud contour Florentine.
Strange hand! I wonder if it toyed / In silken locks of Don Juan, / Or on a gem-bright caftan joyed / To stroke the beard of some soldan;
Whether, as courtesan or queen, / Within its fingers fair and slight / Was pleasure's gilded sceptre seen, / Or sceptre of a royal might!
But sweet and firm it must have lain / Full oft its touch of power rare / Upon the curling lion-mane / Of some chimera caught in air.
Imperial, idle fantasy, / And love of soft, luxurious things, / Frenzies of passion, wondrous, free, / Impossible dream-flutterings!
Romances wild, and poesy / Of hasheech and of wine, vain speeds / Beneath Bohemia's brilliant sky / On unrestrained and maddened steeds!
All these were in the lines of it, / Of that white book with magic scrolled, / Where ciphers stood, by Venus writ, / That Love had trembled to behold.
II. LACENAIRE
Strange contrast was the severed hand / Of Lacenaire, the murderer dead, / Soaked in a powerful essence, and / Near by upon a cushion spread.
Letting a morbid fancy win, / I touched, despite my loathing sane, / The cold, hair-covered, slimy skin, / Not yet washed clean of deathly stain.
Yellow, uncanny, mummified, / Like to a Pharaoh's hand it lay, / And stretched its faun-shaped fingers wide, / Crisp with temptation's awful play;
As though an itch for flesh and gold / Lured them to horrors yet to be, / Twisting them roughly as of old, / Teasing their immobility.
There every vice and passion's whim / Had seamed the flesh abundantly / With hideous hieroglyphs and grim, / That headsmen read with fluency.
There plainly writ in furrows fell, / I saw the deeds of sin and soil, / Scorchings from every fiery hell / Wherein corruptions seethe and boil.
There was a track of Capri's vice, / Of lupanars and gaming-scores, / Fretted with wine and blood and dice, / Like ennui of old emperors.
Supple and fierce, it had some dower / Of grace unto the searching eye, / Some brutal fascination's power, / A gladiator's mastery.