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You descend like an army with banners,
In a cyclone of wrecked parasols.
You look like a mob with mad manners
Or a roystering row of Dutch dolls.
Oh, Priestess of Cubical passion,
Oh, Deification of Whim,
You seem to walk down in the fashion
That lame lobsters swim.

Here we have Mr. P.B. Shelley’s noble lines:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Nude thou never wert.
Not from Heaven nor near it
Breathed thy cubic heart
In profuse stairs of unintelligible art.

What thou art, we know not;
What is thee most like?
Snakes tied in a bow-knot?
Stovepipes on a strike?
Or Bellevue inmates on a Suffrage hike!

We look before and after,
And pine thy face to see;
Our sincerest laughter
Is aroused by thee.
Art thou perchance the sad cube root of 23?

Mr. R. Kipling felt a flash of his old fire, and threw in a high speed:

On an old symbolic staircase,
Looking forty ways at once;
There’s a Cubist Nude descending,
With the queerest sort of stunts.
For the staircase is a-falling,
And the Noodle seems to say:
“Though you hear my soul a-calling,
You can’t see me, anyway!”

Oh, this symbol balderdash,
And this post-Impression trash;
Can’t you see their paint a-chunkin in a hotchy-potchy splash?
Where the motives bold and brash
Of the Cubist painters clash,
And the Nude descends like thunder down a staircase gone to smash!

Mr. D.G. Rossetti, ever a sweet singer, warbled thus tunefully:

The Blessed Nude at eve leaned out
From the gold staircase rail;
Her paint was deeper than the depth
Of waters in a pail.
She wore three bonnets on her heads,
And seven coats of mail.

And still she bowed herself and swayed
In circling cubic charms.
And the pigments of her painted soul
Were loud as war’s alarms.
But the staircase lay as if asleep
Along her fourteen arms.

(I saw her move!) But soon her path
Was cubes instead of spheres;
And then she disappeared among
The staircase barriers;
And, after she was gone, I saw
She’d wept some large paint tears!

Mr. R. Browning found the subject greatly to his liking:

Who will may hear the Staircase story told;
All its blobs, splotches, facets,–what you will;
The vague Nude, compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred stairs,
Dizzily plunging with tumultuous glee!
Whirling the stairdust, hazarding oblique,
The moon safe in her pocket! See she treads
Cool citric crystals, fierce pyropus stone;
While crushing sunbeams in a triple line
Smirk at the insane roses in her hair,
And Strojavacca, frowning, looks asquint
To see that trick of toe,–that dizened heel,–
As she, the somewhat, hangs ‘twixt naught and naught.
A perfect Then,–a sub-potential Now–
A facile and slabsided centipede.

And here is Mr. B. Jonson’s little jingle:

Still to be cubed, still to be square,
As you were going down a stair;
Still to see lurid pigments sluiced,–
Lady, it is to be deduced,
Though art’s hid causes are not found,
All is not square, all is not round.

Give me a cube, give me a line
That makes a whirling maze design;
Robes made of sheet-iron, flowing free,–
Such sweet device more taketh me
Than masterpieces by old Rubes
Which charm not eyes attuned to cubes.

And Mr. J.W. Riley sang in his usual comforting strain:

There, Little Nude, don’t cry!
You’ve descended the stairs, I know;
And the weird wild ways
Of the Cubist Jays
Have made you a holy show!
But Post Impressions will soon pass by.
There Little Nude, don’t cry, don’t cry!