Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents

JOHN GRAY

Silverpoints 1893
bound with
Spiritual Poems 1896

John Gray (1866-1934) was a member of the Wilde circle in the late ’80s and early ’90s, possibly providing a surname for Wilde’s Dorian. His two principal publications of the 1890s strikingly represent the poles of Decadent aesthetic and religious sensibility. Silverpoints, seen at the time by many as the height of aestheticism, includes translation from Verlaine and Laforgue. Spiritual Poems, on the other hand, looks towards those eternal subjects that always haunted the period, and includes translation from St John of the Cross. Both books were designed by Charles Ricketts. Gray became a Catholic and a priest, and continued to publish until two years before his death.

£28.50 $48

I dreamed I was a barber; and there went
Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant,
Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask
Of many a pleasant girl. It was my task
To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand;
To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand;
To draw a bodkin, from a vase of kohl,
Through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl
Of sepia to paint them underneath;
To blow upon their eyes with a soft breath. ...

The dream grew vague. I moulded with my hands
The mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist
I touched; and pigments reverently placed
Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains,
Beryls and crysolites and diaphanes,
And gems whose hot harsh names are never said.

(from Silverpoints, page xii)

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Poetry of the 1890s