Second Woman
Sentimentality
Is the servant-girl of certain men
And the wife of others.
She scarcely ever flirts
With creative minds,
Striving also to become
Graceful and indiscreet.
First Woman
Sappho and Aristotle
Have wandered through the centuries,
Dressed in an occasional novelty—
A little twist of outward form.
They have always been ashamed
To be caught in a friendly talk.
Second Woman
When emotion and the mind
Engage in deliberate dialogue,
One hundred nightingales
And intellectuals find a common ground,
And curse the meeting of their slaves!
First Woman
The mind must only play
With polished relics of emotion,
And the heart must never lighten
Burdens of the mind.
Second Woman
I desire to be
Irrelevant and voluble,
Leaving my terse disgust for a moment.
I have met an erudite poet
With a northern hardness
Motionless beneath his youthful robes.
He shuns the quivering fluencies
Of emotion, and shifts his dominoes
Within a room of tortured angles.
But away from this creative room
He sells himself to the whims
Of his wife, a young virago
With a calculating nose.
Beneath the flagrant pose
Of his double life
Emotion and the mind
Look disconsolately at each other.