Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE TOILETTE OF MYRRHINE, by EDITH SITWELL



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BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE TOILETTE OF MYRRHINE, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Siesta time is hot in hell
Last Line: The night to make her beauty-patch.


SIESTA time is hot in Hell!
Down the glittering shutters fell,
With a noise Arabian
Like the rustling pearls that fan

The eyes of rajahs when they hide
Beyond the incense-flowing tide
Their majesty, all lonely save
For the hot Nubian sun, their slave.

And like the lovely light gazelles
Walking by deep water-wells,
Shadows past her mirrors fleet
Through bright trellises of heat.

Through the shutters fawning crept
A barber zephyr, cringing stept
Through the shutters fallen like water --
Hiding Hell's most lovely daughter.

The sun, a ripened apricot,
Still made the flattened roof-tops hot,
And at her table preened and set
Myrrhine sits at her toilette.

"Madame Myrrhine, if you please,"
Fawning said the barber breeze,
"I will coiff as light as air
That Arabian wind your hair."

Never had the perfumed seas
Such bright grape-black curls as these,
Fallen like rustling pearls that run,
Burnt by the hot Nubian sun,

From each elephantine trunk
The waterfalls rear. Myrrhine shrunk,
But now the barber zephyr curls
Black cornucopias of pearls.

Upon the dressing-table, heat
Is flaunting like a parokeet,
And in the street, dust-white and lean,
Two black apes bear her palanquin.

Through the shutters see those apes'
Eyes like green and golden grapes . . .
Their falsetto voices made
A false simian serenade.

The negress Dinah, through unheard
Shutters like the sun's gold gourd,
Bears her powder-puff -- the breath
Of an angel, a swan's death.

Never once Myrrhine replies
To those apes with slanting eyes . . .
She died a thousand years ago --
From dust her beauty ripened slow.

But Fanfreluche her parrot closes
With the ballerina roses --
Pecks them -- Dinah longs to snatch
The night to make her beauty-patch.





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