The Pre-Raphaelites

‘What do you mean by beauty?’ In the Grosvenor Gallery
In our ‘mediæval’ dresses, in our rapt and utterly

Fashionable gazes, we cannot touch
The isinglass wall of these

Damned unprofitable lives. What it is
That wrecks us—
I was lying
In the garden, up against the barrier

The mandragora were twined like thin fingers.
Sometimes I pose when no-one is there.

Please God I am a creature of habit and well-fed. A puzzle
Like a door in a hedge that is made of hedge, inscrutable.

What it is that is wrong in me—
When one glove in a pair is turned inside-out
It becomes the same as the other one, but with the seams exposed.

Nobody wants to see that.
Here is a conjuror’s trick:

I the disappearing girl. Look again and I turn up back in the box,
Same as before. I have not got anywhere.

Why am I, why am I caught
In the hinge of this world and it presses me, where was the wrong turn

Taken took me to the middle of the maze and gave
Me this head, these hands, this beast’s face?