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Books

In Black & White

Order

Title Page
Under the Hill

Prose
The Art of the Hoarding
Letters to his Critics
   Pall Mall Budget
   Daily Chronicle
   St. Paul’s
Table Talk
Lines upon Pictures
   St Rose of Lima
   Salome

Poetry
The Three Musicians
The Ballad of a Barber
Ave Atque Vale
The Celestial Lover
The Ivory Piece
Prospectus for Volpone

Appendix : Juvenilia
The Valiant
A Ride in an Omnibus
The Confession Album
The Courts of Love
Dante in Exile
Written in Uncertainty
The Morte Darthur

Enoch Soames

Under the Hill

The Ivory Piece

A fragment of verse

Carelessly coiffed, with sash half slipping down
Cravat mis-tied, and tassels left to stream,
I walked haphazard through the early town,
Teased with the memory of a charming dream.

I recollected a great room. The day,
Half dead, lit faintly on the walls the pale
And sudden eyes that showed the formal play
Of woven actors in some curious tale.

In fabulous gardens, where romantic trees
Perched on the branches birds without a name.

¶ 1898. Written in January 1898, shortly before his last illness, this draft of a poem—of which both theme and context remain tantalisingly obscure—gives an intriguing glimpse into the elliptic flights of Beardsley’s imagination.