The Garden by The Bridge (excerpts below - please click to read entire)
All night the hungry jackals howl together
Over the carrion in the river bed,
Or seize some small soft thing of fur or feather
 |
The Scream, Edvard Munsch 1893 |
Whose dying shrieks on the night air are shed.
I hear from yonder Temple in the distance
Whose roof with obscene carven Gods is piled,
Reiterated with a sad insistence
Sobs of, perhaps, some immolated child.
Strange rites here, where the archway's shade is deeper,
Are consummated in the river bed;
Parias steal the rotten railway sleeper
To burn the bodies of their cholera dead.
But yet, their lust, their hunger, cannot shame them
Goaded by fierce desire, that flays and stings;
Poor beasts, and poorer men. Nay, who shall blame them?
Blame the Inherent Cruelty of Things.
The world is horrible and I am lonely,
Let me rest here where yellow roses bloom
And find forgetfulness, remembering only
Your face beside me in the scented gloom.
Nay, do not shrink! I am not here for passion,
I crave no love, only a little rest,
Although I would my face lay, lover's fashion,
Against the tender coolness of your breast.
I am so weary of the Curse of Living
The endless, aimless torture, tumult, fears.
Surely, if life were any God's free giving,
He, seeing His gift, long since went blind with tears.
There comes some point in most people's lives in which illusions are shed or stripped away. It can be a great shock when an individual perceives "The World As It Is" as Pulitzer Prize winner
Chris Hedges summarizes it, instead of The World As They Were Taught, or The World They Wish Were True. Ultimately, when the naked and violent aggressions behind our social constructs are revealed in all their ugliness and amorality, it may become a moral crises. Tennyson's
"Nature, red in tooth and claw" was an accepted truth of the 19th century - but that was
nature, not humanity. We are taught that Humanity is supposed to do a great deal better than Nature when it comes to ethical questions, and all of our civilizing institutions are constructed with this veneer.

Because Western religion, government, education and culture are imbued with aims of social progress - the belief that Mankind is ultimately good or at least trying to evolve in that direction - the very thought of decay creeping into these sacred institutions is abhorrent to society's gatekeepers. Thus in Hope's day most critics were quite comfortable shunning the Decadent movement in the arts. But any movements towards "Decadence" must be seen for what they are - basically critiques of the current social and political climate, usually by the young, and thus intolerable to The Establishment on any long term basis.
In the same way, society generally rejects literary depictions of horror, decay, death and
"the dark side" as essentially juvenile - something to be grown out
of, like comic books. Edgar Allan Poe's work was derided as sophomoric upon his death,
and considered distasteful for many decades in America. The punk and
Gothic movements of the 70s through the
90s were co-opted by teen pop culture and relabeled "Grunge" and "Emo"
as fashion magazine fodder, easily
digested, laughed at, dismissed. Kipling certainly grew out of his calf-love of
decadent themes and
opium dreams to become the most highly influential Voice of Empire of his generation, almost
wholly aligned with the interests of the ruling class.