The Butcher's Stall (_From "Les Villes Tentaculaires:" The Octopus Cities_) BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN (Belgian poet, born 1855. When Maurice Maeterlinck was suggested as a member of the French Academy, he recommended that the honor should be conferred upon Verhaeren instead. Beginning his career as a decadent and victim of disease, Verhaeren evolved into a rhapsodist of modern civilization. No poet has ever approached him in the portrayal and interpretation of factories, forges, railroads, and all the phenomena of industrialism. Of late he has become an ardent Socialist. The poem here quoted is from a book portraying the sins and agonies of great cities. Only portions of the poem could be printed in a work intended for general circulation in English; but even of these passages the editor will venture the assertion that never before has the horror of prostitution been so packed into human speech) Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft, When eyes of lamps are burning soft, The shy, dark quarter lights again its old Allurement of red vice and gold. Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat, Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street, Calling to every man that passes; Behind them, at the end of corridors, Shine fires, a curtain stirs And gives a glimpse of masses Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses. Hard by the docks The street upon the left is ended by A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks A sheet of sky; Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys Falls from the town--and here the black crowd rallies And reels to rotten revelry. It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea. Far-sailing melancholy mariners Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer, Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces, All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls; Their raw desire to madness galls; The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces; The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces; And their two arms implore Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore. And they of offices and shops, the city tribes, Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes, Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows, When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall, Feel the same galling rut at even-fall, And run like hunted dogs to the carouse. Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks, And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care, That they are racked and ruined by despair. It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea.