A Report on the Victorians

Heaven, along with the railroads and docks,

Prospered. They were separate endeavors but fitted together:

The eternal was the greater clock,

Commerce the mighty lever.

Meanwhile, money brought security, power, and ease.

It made a comforting sound on the collection plate.

It softened man's fate.

Death had no taste for debate;

Like a mower, the coughing disease

Would have its wasted crop. Hymn singers and tarts

Competed on the streets. Adjuration was the age's genius.

They were great ones for looking up. The piteous

Excited them, sentiment derided art,

And heaven was real, or if not real, should have been.

It was where beauty lay with justice above

The filthy cities. It was where love

Overcame doubt. As horror impinged,

Purity became their passion.

Women's bodies were lost, conversation

Consisted of the unsaid, out of admiration

And longing there grew up a cult of the dead.

Bourgeois black was the color in fashion.

Sawdust was common in the poorer folks' bread.

Sanity was impossible, instead there was realism,

The brisk "That can't be, that will not do,"

And evangelism's admonitory "Christ died for you."

Their manners were good; they reinvented schisms

And tamed the sublime.

Their music was bad, their theatre worse,

Their paintings as insipid as their taste in verse.

Condemn them? Never. They are the paradigm,

The fiend in the angelic face,

The hope in the presence of accountable disgrace.