The Awakening Conscience

Holman Hunt’s extravaganza of Victoriana
first and last astonishes – one hungers
for the summer London of his polished
rosewood and embroidered silks – the sleek
enameling of his enamored brush with flesh
beneath that ‘fallen woman’s’ dress:

young man ejaculating whiskers like a Satyr;
and the mirror catching the ascending
lady from the back, affording some small
glimpse of the Edenic gated garden towards
which she is summoned: as if in an epiphany
wherein the Serpent, now Apollo, turns

from black to gold, and asks that she exhume
herself from that fool’s mortal hold, reune
with gods – to swim in all the glory
of their brimming colors and the richness
of their jeweled and lacquered dreams –
macerate in their elaborately oil-painted

scenes. That virtue could be so supposed
to find its genesis in arrant bliss bespeaks
the truly moral current which will not
put up with one whit less than the amoral,
unimpededly divine, sweet kiss: if
conscience is awakened, it awakes to this.

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