Squalor Victoria(n)

The Background:
Victorian poets often wrote about sexual desire to resist moral attitudes that were seen as repressive. While science flourished, Darwin and his contemporaries began to experience a "loss of faith". Previously inexplicable phenomena found ready explanations; what need did Man have for God? And they were having a lot more sex than everyone else in that era thought. Prostitution became known as a great social ill, the slums in London expanded, and the poor lived in mess and squalor.


Romanticism: "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals." -Isaiah Berlin


To the Victorian poets of Decadence:

"I love you, you who conquered lands unknown,
spread diseases, plagues full-blown.
I love you, you who revelled
in the unbearable lushness of being
sensuous, decadent, hellenic kings
of insidious words, slipping sweetly,
slidingly,
into the narrows of the outraged public brain.

How I love you, you who exhilarated
in deep despair; woe to the nightingale immortalised!
Who yet found meaning in dark emptiness,
rallying 'round with the cry of 'Art for art's sake!'
And so you, bridled with emotion, eat your cake,
fuming with bright, bitter melancholy,
never gaining the intimacy
and restfulness you so craved.

I think I love you because I understand you,
you who search relentlessly through
the victorious squalor of life that will not cede
control to your grasping hands
but jostles greedily to conquer virtuous lands.
Run away Prudence, Chastity and Grace!
Fall to your knees, hang your head, hide your face,
let shame overtake you, for Faith is but a cuss word, you've decided.

And so, you arrogant men who surrender
to the hedonist's depraved desires, you pleasure seeker,
dear sybarite, voluptuary and sumptuous epicure,
You whose gilt-edged poetry tongues my heart,
whose heady sensitivity makes me start,
and long for the things of the world I should not cannot want,
I love you unto madness, to distraction, to a slant-
ing of morals, to giving in and giving up.

I fall, a long way down."