"They will rise up and hear your voice And clash their cymbals and rejoice and run to kiss your mouth!..." He advises to-- "Follow some raving lion's spoor across the copper-coloured plain," and take him as a lover or to mate with a tiger-- "And toy with him in amorous jests, and when he turns and snarls and gnaws O smite him with your jasper claws! and bruise him with your agate breasts!" But "her sullen ways" pall on him, her presence fills him with horror, "poisonous and heavy breath makes the light flicker in the lamp." The poet wonders what "songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night." He drives the cat away with every opprobrious epithet for she wakes in him "each bestial sense" and makes him what he "would not be." She makes his "creed a barren shame," and wakes "foul dreams of sensual life," and with a return to sanity he chases her away. "Go thou before," he cries, "And leave me to my crucifix Whose pallid burden sick with pain watches the world with wearied eyes And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in pain." On this note of pessimism and refusal the poem ends. In the realm of the fantastic it has no equal and though the objection may be raised that the whole thing is unhealthy, the truth is that it is merely an experimental excursion in the abnormal. It has all the fantastic unreality of Chinese dragons, and, therefore, can in no way be harmful. The nightmare effect has no lasting influence. We read it as we would any other imaginative grotesque. But whilst we are alternately fascinated and repulsed by the subject, we are lost in admiration of the decorative treatment of the theme. The whole performance is artificial, but so is all Oriental art.