Classic and Contemporary Poetry
BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE TOILETTE OF MYRRHINE, by EDITH SITWELL 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. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BUCOLIC COMEDY: EARLY SPRING by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: FLEECING TIME by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: FOX TROT by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR MAID by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: SERENADE by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: SPINNING SONG by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: SPRING by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE BEAR by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE DOLL by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE FOX; FOR ANN PEARN by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: WHY by EDITH SITWELL ELEGY: THE GHOST WHOSE LIPS WERE WARM; FOR GEOFFREY GORER by EDITH SITWELL |
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