74
PERFUMERY
A Persian woman knelt before a fireOf spices smouldering in a copper pan.A great red ruby weighed her shallow brow,An orange topaz lit her plaited hair,Her round arms faded into velvet night,Her silken garments rustled in the dark.Only her pale face showed above the glow,And one faint gleam of ivory ankles bareAbove the red morocco silver-stitched,Of heel-less slippers. Then from out the duskThere came two yellow, thin and awful handsTo grip about the satin of her throat,And, as she strangled, she could taste the smokeOf stolen incense from the High Priest's jar.
A lady in a ruff and stomacher,With ropes of pearls dependent to her waist,Crept down a stairway, when the clamorous rooksOn a grey English dawning told that dayHad come with black frosts to the frozen poolsAnd trees that creaked and shuddered in the cold.An old man sleeping in a shuttered room,With wrinkled hand against a sharpened sword,Smelled roses as she passed. He woke . . and moaned . .Her lover, too, smelled roses as he died.
I take the stopper from a phial to-day—A slender thing of crystal, with a pearlIn blue enamel on a coat of arms,And from the amber liquid prisoned there(Perhaps ten drops to prove ten thousand flowers!),I see the ghost of long dead women riseWith scented palms and little perfumed ears,Rare waters for the hollow in the throatWhere favoured lips may sip them! Creams for breasts(That need them not!) to make the curves more fair;
