Classic Poem

Learn, oh ye rash and kiss-enraptured lovers,
That she ye worship as a fleshy shrine,
The loved one, rose-mouthed, plastic and divine,
Was mine and is; my breath around her hovers.

Her beauteous body is my slave; I use it.
There is no secret in her burning form
I have not mastered when with passion warm,
And she is repossessed when I so choose it.

Cleopatra in my bold embraces reveled;
Before lewd Faust I loved blonde Marguerite;
I bathed the brows of Beatrix the sweet,
My fire-kiss lingered in her hair disheveled.

All women who fill man's mind with admiration,
The chosen of history that none forget,
Semiramis, Virginia, Antoinette,
Helen and Ruth, were mine in fond prostration.

Naught sacred is exempted, for the Powers
That gave me being haughtily ordained:
" Go on thy way, and leave no thing unstained!
Sully the fruits, the blossoms and the flowers! "

And I, with jubilance complete and nameless,
Obey the insolence of these commands,
Speeding unwearied through unnumbered lands,
To soil all purities by men held blameless.

I choose the winning hour when beauty dreaming
Awaits the coming lover with soft sighs,
And I delight to note the half-closed eyes,
And all the mystic ardors gently teeming.

Morbid and mute, warm, fragrant and erotic,
She lies in drowsy trances of desire;
Then I, to quench her ample bosom's fire,
Appear, appease, allay, in all despotic!

The sad and cloistered nun, who strives to sever
The bonds of love and all that makes life fair,
Whose pallid lips are ever parched by prayer,
In spite of missal and psalm is mine forever.

And when the heats of fancy brand and burn me,
No modern Messalina, silk-arrayed,
By haughty nonchalances can evade
The fury of my vast desires, or spurn me.