On The Hunt

I admire the way poet Elinor Wylie defied the classic horror tradition by making the speaker a woman.

Full Moon

**

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;

The black gauze was beggarly thin;

The ermine muffled mouth and chin;

I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges

Of love and hate, I walked in these

Striped and ragged rigmaroles;

Along the pavement my footsoles

Trod warily on living coals.

Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,

In their corrupt disguises clothed,

Morality I could not tear

From my ribs, to leave them bare

Ivory in silver air.

There I walked, and there I raged;

The spiritual savage caged

Within my skeleton, raged afresh

To feel, behind a carnal mesh,

The clean bones crying in the flesh.

Elinor Wylie,
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