Wan mists enwrap the still-born day;

The harebell withers on the heath,

And all the moorland seems to breathe

The hectic beauty of decay.

—Mathilde Blind, “The Evening of the Year,” Songs and Sonnets

To again invoke the organic metaphor at the root of decadence, what is crucial about the notion of decay is not so much the change from a greater to a lesser state, but the changing itself.

—David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism

[T]he aim of decadence, whether in science or art, is to challenge the limits that mark some forms of knowledge as permissible and others as forbidden, regardless of the results.

—Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment”

Twenty years before Arthur Symons gave the movement a local habitation and a name, British decadence flourished in the short-lived but influential house-organ of the aesthetic movement the Dark Blue. It was here that Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla, that Swinburne published “The End of a Month,”¹

and that Gabriel Rossetti published “Down Stream.” It was here, too, between 1871 and 72, that the pioneering female aesthete Mathilde Blind published “The Song of the Willi” and “Nocturne,” ballads that anticipate the attitudes and themes that would come to define and dominate decadent poetry at the fin de siècle: a scorn for bourgeois values and norms; sexual noncomformism and transgression; an interest in the obsessive, the morbid, the perverse.² The speaker of “The Song of the Willi,” for instance, is a poetic ancestor of the female vampire in Rosamund Marriott Watson's “Vespertilia” (1895), whose erotic desire even death cannot quell. What Linda K. Hughes has written about “Vespertilia” – that it is “recognizably decadent in its hauntings and haunting articulations of the ineffable border between life and death and its complex psychological states, ranging from denial to neurosis” (“Feminizing Decadence” 132) – applies with equal force to “The Song of the Willi.” And the hallucinatory “Nocturne,” featuring a male speaker whose passion curdles into madness when his lover mysteriously dies beside him as they drift on a boat at sea, recalls Gautier's definition of decadence in his 1868 essay on Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal: “the subtle confidences of neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness” (qtd. in Ellis 25).³ After publishing “Nocturne,” however, Blind went on a nine-year hiatus from poetry, turning instead to translating (David Strauss's The Old Faith and the New, 1873), editing, and reviewing. When she reemerged as a poet in the 1880s, it seemed as if she had broken definitively with what she called in 1884 “the aesthetic school of poetry of our own day.”⁴ “The Prophecy of St. Oran” (1881) embodies a Straussian (and feminist) religion of humanity and was withdrawn by its publisher in 1881 because of fears about its “atheistic character”; The Heather on Fire (1886) is a poetic cry of outrage at English policies toward Scotland during the “Crofter's War” of the 1880s; “The Ascent of Man” (1889) seeks to weave a new, humanist mythology from the resistant threads of Darwinian theory.⁵

Yet in the 1880s Blind also established close associations and friendships with key figures of fin-de-siècle England's emergent decadent subcultures, gay and straight, female and male: Amy Levy, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons.⁶

And by the 1890s, she was fusing aestheticism and naturalism so distinctively in her poetry that Symons evoked Baudelaire in reviewing the dramatic monologues in Dramas in Miniature (1891), calling them “flowers of evil” (660). The decadent poems Blind published in this volume, as well as in Songs and Sonnets (1893), Birds of Passage (1895), and the Savoy magazine, differ sharply from the “nude, noble, and antique” ballads that appeared in the Dark Blue, however.⁷ They reflect her increasing interest in the intersections of scientific positivism, progressive politics, and avant-garde art. While Darwin tempered the melioristic humanism she imbibed from Comte and Strauss, her encounter with positivist science was liberating in other ways. It engendered a rethinking of and return to aestheticism and a series of poems that, like the late-century scientific ethos itself, challenges the limits of permissible knowledge. They subvert the patriarchal assumptions of the male decadents of the fin de siècle while radically reimagining identity, sexuality, and cosmology.

While she was at work on her translation of The Old Faith and New, Blind met a mathematician and philosopher whose own positivism was both less religious and more militant than Strauss's. William Kingdon Clifford was appointed professor and chair of Mathematics and Mechanics at University College London in 1871 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1874. In 1875 he married Lucy Lane, who became a successful novelist in the 1880s and a close friend of Blind's. Clifford's 1868 lecture “On Some of the Conditions of Mental Development” posits a radical conception of identity – “the mind is changing so constantly that we only know it by its changes” (79) – and enlists evolutionary theory in the service of subversive ideology:

Clifford was only thirty-four when he died of pulmonary consumption in 1879, and Blind commemorated his death in a poem she included in the St. Oran volume. “A Perfect Union” hails Clifford as a positivist hero, and praises his courage in “fronting the dumb unfathomed grave/With unintimidated eyes;/Though not for him, beyond its night,/Resuscitated Hope alight/Prescient, on peaks of Paradise” (14–18). The poem's speaker is Clifford's wife Lucy, who shares her husband's (and Blind's) ideas about the plasticity of identity and his belief that human memory is the only form of immortality: “I am no longer what I was;/My nature is the pictured glass,/Where he who lived lives on and on;/All ye who loved him, ye may see/His spirits still investing me” (43–47). The fact that Clifford's spirit passes into a woman's body and voice here is significant; both Blind and Lucy Clifford became influential progressive voices in the 1880s and 90s, appropriating W. K. Clifford's positivism for their own feminist ends.

“A Perfect Union” intimates the radical ideas about selfhood that Clifford had been working out in the 1870s. His 1875 lecture “On the Scientific Basis of Morals” destabilizes the self in terms that anticipate decadent representations of identity – including Blind's:

In this same lecture, Clifford argues that purpose of the social self “is perfection, and not happiness; for which reason it seems to me that the ethic of science is not utilitarian in the ordinary sense” (3). Both these ideas – of the decentered self and of a non-utilitarian scientific ethos – place Clifford at the center of the late-Victorian nexus of science and decadence. As Christine Ferguson has noted, many of the traits associated with literary decadence, from hedonism to disease, derive from an ethos shared by “late-century experimental science and art,” adding that they are “secondary symptoms of a fascination with the acquisition of forbidden knowledge and experience”: Ferguson adds that it is for this reason that “many literary representations of decadence conclude with the literal or symbolic destruction of their central protagonists – not because the decadent pursuit is sterile and bound to fail but because the collapse of the self fulfills a certain project of knowing” (470). Ferguson takes her examples from decadent fiction – J. K. Huysmans's Against the Grain, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time, Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill (which began appearing in the same issue of the Savoy where Blind published her last sonnet) – but her analysis applies equally to late-century poetry.

Evolutionary theory did more than anything to “dissolve the way the subject had been envisioned” in late-century England, and Blind's 1889 The Ascent of Man takes the full measure of this dissolution. Employing dozens of stanza forms and marked by abrupt shifts of tone, the title poem of the volume mimics the fecundity, profligacy, and unruliness that Darwin identifies with nature itself, most notably during his discussion of sexual selection in The Descent of Man. It seeks the truth behind what Blind in part three calls “this masquerade of culture” that hides “strange hyena appetites/The frank ravening of the raw-necked vulture/As its beak the senseless carrion smites” (328–31). It also enacts the destruction of the humanist subject as Judeo-Christianity conceives it.⁸

This destruction is encapsulated in “Nirvana,” one of the sonnets included in The Ascent of Man volume – a post-Christian vision of death as a collapse of self that liberates the “soul” (here envisioned as a materialist essence) from the “self's hard tyranny” (line 12). Once liberated, this “soul” becomes “a ripple rounded by the sea,/…lapped within the All” (13–14).⁹ Although traditional accounts of literary decadence would not accommodate The Ascent of Man, its preoccupation with violent upheaval – in nature and culture – is decadent in precisely the terms David Weir defines the term: “Decadence is transition, a drama of unsettled aesthetics, and the mixture of literary tendencies constituting that transition is at once within and without tradition and convention…. Decadence, then, is less a period of transition than a dynamics of transition” (14–15).

The Ascent of Man also anticipates the intense preoccupation with gender that characterizes Blind's subsequent writing. The title poem asks what will redeem mankind “from ancestral greeds,/Grey legacies of hate and hoar misdeeds,/Which from the guilty past Man doth inherit” (1.6, 702–04), and it repeatedly turns to women. As Linda Hughes has noted, if Darwin could be employed by conservatives to refute works like Mill's On the Subjection of Women “by arguing that women's subordinate position was the fit outcome of natural selection, evolution could also suggest to feminists that women were evolving into a new and higher form” (“1870” 42–43). Ignoring Darwin's own claim in The Descent of Man that women share the faculties and characteristics of “the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization” (2: 326–27), Mona Caird, an intimate of Blind in the late 1880s and early 90s, manipulated the discourse of evolution for feminist ends. In her answer to Eliza Lynn Linton's series of essays on “Wild Women,” which claim that these “new” women seek to compete alongside men, Caird argues that women can point the way out of the wilderness of ruthless competition where men are currently wandering:

Caird wrote these words in 1892, three years after reading (or hearing in one of the literary salons she and Blind attended) this passage in Part 3 of “The Ascent of Man,” in which the voice of nature speaks to the female poet and calls upon her to While writing these lines, Blind was also at work on a two-part essay on the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff for Oscar Wilde's Woman's World.¹⁰ In this essay Blind responds to those critics surprised by the young Bashkirtseff's ability to identify with the orphaned and the homeless in several of her canvases: “did she not belong to the sex that has hitherto been held in subjection, and to a nation whose very name signifies bondage?…And just as bondslaves were the first promulgators of the Gospel, it is not surprising if in art, in literature, and in politics, women are becoming the interpreters and champions of the social and humanitarian movement of our time” (“Marie Bashkirtseff” 356).

Blind's subsequent translation of The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890) – including her pointedly feminist introduction – placed Blind at the center of late-century debates about decadence and the New Woman. It also shaped the decadent poetry Blind wrote in its wake.¹¹

Bashkirtseff's untutored, radical feminism, expressed with flashes of brilliance, colloquial wit, and anger, thrilled Blind and her contemporaries, especially Bashkirtseff's anti-essentialist view of gender, which dissolves the way the female subject had been envisioned: “I grumble at being a woman because there is nothing of the woman about me but the envelope” (2: 6). Like Blind and many of her contemporaries, Bashkirtseff longs to be a flâneuse in the tradition of that arch-decadent Baudelaire, to wander the streets freely with no direction but her own fleeting desires: “what I long for is the freedom of going about alone, of coming and going, of sitting on the seats in the Tuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stopping and looking at the artistic shops, of entering the churches and museums, of walking about the old streets at night” (1: 21). Bashkirtseff's atheism also would have appealed to Blind, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Amy Levy, Constance Naden, and Mona Caird, who were united in their rejection of theist belief: “What can be more indelicate than to cover all one's failings with the word of God? It is indelicate; it is more, it is criminal, if one believes in God” (2: 114).

As her introduction to the translation makes clear, Blind identified with Bashkirtseff – her artistic ambition, her rage at gender constraints, her iconoclasm – and expected her contemporaries to do so as well: “here is a girl, the story of whose life as told by herself may be called the drama of a woman's soul; at odds with destiny, as such a soul must needs be, when endowed with great powers and possibilities, under the present social conditions; where the wish to live, of letting whatever energies you possess have their full play in action, is continually thwarted by the impediments and restrictions of sex” (vii).¹²

Comparing Blind's 1890 translation of the journal with the 1891 translation by Mary J. Serrano, Kabi Hartman has demonstrated that Blind consciously “presents a Marie Bashkirtseff intensely preoccupied with the question of how gender affects the project of (self)-representation…. As a feminist, Blind set out to translate the Journal so as to challenge its readers to think more deeply about the splitting effect of patriarchal culture on artistic women” (78). In doing so, Blind created a narrative of the kind Ferguson identifies with scientific decadence – one that decenters the self, one in which the death of the protagonist “fulfills a certain project of knowing.” Blind writes that Bashkirtseff “is made up of heterogeneous elements, and her mutability of mood is a constant surprise to the reader,” and she associates this heterogeneity with the fin-de-siècle temper itself: “she was too intensely modern for repose” (viii, ix). Near the end of her journal, and just three months before her death, Bashkirtseff records a final observation about the dissolution of the gendered self – something she repeatedly yearns for. She has been writing about what happens when human nature is observed “through the microscope,” which she then turns on herself: “I am neither painter, nor sculptor, nor musician; neither woman, nor daughter, nor friend. Everything reduces itself with me into subjects of observation, reflection, and analysis” (2: 384).

Blind adopts this same scientific language in recommending Bashkirtseff's journal to her English audience: “To read it is an education in psychology. For in this startling record a human being has chosen to lay before us ‘the very pulse of the machine,’ to show us the momentary feelings and impulses, the uninvited backstair thoughts passing like a breath across our consciousness, which we ignore for the most part when presenting our mental harvest to the public” (vii). Just a year before Blind wrote these words, the Scottish journalist and woman of letters Marie Blaye de Bury attacked the French decadents for combining “the ideas of decomposition and youth,” and for fabricating “a new sort of humanity, the ‘man of the laboratory’” (395). For Blind, however, adopting this quasi-scientific perspective on Bashkirtseff, claiming her as a representative modern type, was a way of legitimizing the subversive implications of her life story, not a means of aligning herself with Zola and other French decadents.¹³

A similar impulse can be seen operating in Blind's collection Dramas in Miniature, published less than a year after the Bashkirtseff translation. The first eight poems in this collection are dramatic monologues, associated for the Victorians with “objective” as opposed to “subjective” modes of representation. And Blind uses this form to legitimize the often transgressive impulses of her speakers – impulses which often embody emergent cultural practices. “Scherzo,” for example, is one of several poems of the period (there are others by Michael Field, E. Nesbit, Dora Sigerson Shorter) featuring women as desiring subjects. Here the female speaker turns the male into an object of her erotic gaze:

The speaker here almost seems like a “woman of the laboratory” as her near-microscopic inspection lingers over the veins on the temples of her object of desire. She also resembles Marie Bashkirtseff, who often expressed physical desire without enlisting love as justification. Describing a man who courted her during her stay in Rome in 1876, she writes: “I cannot say that I love him but I can certainly say that I desire him….It is in the arms of Pietro that I would like to be…eyes closed, I achieve such an illusion that I almost believe myself there and then and then…I am furious” (qtd. in Parker and Pollock xiii).

For Blind and other New Women poets, female sexual desire unmoored from marriage constituted “the most forbidden knowledge of all…that which had no clear use or moral purpose,” and many of their poems explore this phenomenon. In her introduction to her translation of Bashkirtseff's journal Blind links Bashkirtseff directly with her friend Rosamund Marriott Watson, whose exercise of sexual freedom had made her notorious in many circles.¹⁵

Describing Bashkirtseff's unrepentant hedonism, Blind alludes to Watson's poem “Of the Earth, Earthy,” a militantly secular paean to sensuous existence: “no rapt and saintly vision clothed in the purity of dawn passes across her vision; this child of the nineteenth century is of the earth earthy” (xii).¹⁶ “Scherzo” partakes of this same spirit. Its speaker compares her would-be lover to Endymion, whose beauty inflamed Diana, and describes her passion in pagan, intensely sensual terms: The speaker also effects an inversion of conventional gender roles in this passage, first by investing the male beloved with qualities typically ascribed to females by desiring males (passive receptivity, purity, sweetness, warmth), then by comparing the ivy that protectively “shields” him to a woman.

The penultimate stanza of the poem describes how Diana's desire for Endymion surprised her, causing her to momentarily forget her reputation for purity: “She forgot in her surprise,/When her empyrean eyes/Saw Endymion where he lay/Slumbering” (75–78). The words immediately following the caesura in line 78, however, emphasize choice and agency, as “she cast away/Her immortal honour, clear/As her own unclouded sphere,/For the palpitating bliss/Of a surreptitious kiss” (75–82). Although she willingly gives up “her immortal honour” to transform herself from a virgin goddess to desiring woman, her embrace of sexuality is not associated with any sacrifice of human honour (her own “sphere” remained “unclouded”). In this sense Diana, like “Scherzo” itself, forcefully represents every woman's right to sexual self-determination.

“Scherzo” resembles the other lyrics in the Dramas in Miniature volume, but Blind's inclusion of the poem with the “dramas” was likely strategic. As an attractive, accomplished, unmarried woman holding radical views of sexual politics, she knew that some of her contemporaries viewed her as a threat to bourgeois sexual morality, and would equate her with the speaker of poems like this one.¹⁷

Beginning in the mid-1870s, she spent a good part of each year living in the Ford Madox Brown household, and her complex relationship with the painter elicited much speculation. In his 15 January 1891 diary entry, William Michael Rossetti reports that when Ford Madox Brown's grandson Ford Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) was staying in Paris the previous summer with his uncle, “this uncle made some reference to the intimacy of Math. Blind in Brown's house, and denounced in the strongest terms her family, or some members of her family, and vowed that, if M. B. continued to go to the house, he would have nothing further to do with Ford+c.” (A.1.1.5). Leslie Stephen, who in the 1880s was a regular visitor at the home of Lucy Clifford, categorized Blind as one “of Lucy's freethinking friends,” and he thought of her as a pernicious influence because she wanted Clifford to publish her late husband's criticisms of marriage (2: 345). Blind in fact offered her copy of Clifford's paper “Mistress or Wife?” to Karl Pearson on 25 January 1887, after acknowledging that Lucy “begs me not to ‘let it be used in any way’” (Letter to Karl Pearson). Like W. K. Clifford, Pearson was a professor of mathematics at University College London (in 1885 Pearson brought out Clifford's The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences, left unpublished at the author's death). He was also a fellow freethinker and radical, the founder of the radical Men and Women's Club, and, along with his fellow club member (and future wife) Maria Sharpe, explored the intersection of positivism and sexuality in papers and publications. As Judith R. Walkowitz has noted, Pearson and Sharpe's writings and lectures both emphasized “the plasticity of social relationships and refuted the operation of any absolute code of morality” (162). They also support the idea of free monogamous unions. In a 24 March 1887 letter to Pearson, written three years before “Scherzo,” Blind notes that she has read “The Woman Question” and “Socialism and Sex,” adding that the latter “gives food for a great deal of reflection and controversy.” In “Socialism and Sex,” Pearson imagines a future in which men and women will be physical and intellectual equals, and “a non-child-bearing woman will be the economic equal of man.” When this occurs, what Pearson calls the “sex-relationship” will become “a pure question of taste, a simple matter of agreement between the man and her, in which neither society nor the state would have any need or right to interfere” (442). “Scherzo” imagines the gain in female freedom and pleasure this positivist vision would grant while emphasizing that the burden of sexual morality continues to weigh heaviest on women.

Pearson, as Walkowitz has noted, “was one of those ‘New Men’ of the 1880s…who criticized and heralded the end of the partriarchal era but looked with fear towards the new feminist order” (139). All of his writings reflect masculinist and heterosexist assumptions challenged by club members like Sharpe and Olive Schreiner – and by Blind's late poetry. By the late 1880s, Blind's experiences and writing were gesturing toward wider conceptions of sexual freedom and sexual relations than dreamt of in Pearson's philosophy. As a central figure in London's community of avant-garde women writers, she identified most closely with those who challenged the patriarchal order: Mary Robinson, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Michael Field, Edith Nesbit, Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, Violet Hunt, and Mona Caird. Blind's increasing contact with sexual noncomformists in the 1880s was followed by the publication of poems whose ambiguously gendered speakers and “feminised sensory tableau” (to use Linda Hughes's phrase) accommodate lesbian or bisexual readings.¹⁸

One of the lyrics in Dramas in Miniature, for instance (“Sometimes I Wonder”), speaks of “The love I never dare confess;/Yet hard, yea, harder to repress/Than tears too fain to start”; its last stanza employs the decadent trope of the languid lover to represent the conflicting feelings of the speaker in the face of a passion impossible to categorize: As in the sonnet “Nirvana,” Blind explores the dissolution of self that is a recurring theme within positivist decadence, but here it is linked with erotic desire in ways that intimate the fluidity of sexual identity.

Blind's own sexual identity became more fluid in the 1890s, reflected in some of the poems in Songs and Sonnets and Birds of Passage as well as the Commonplace Book that preceded them. Two years after publishing “Sometimes I Wonder,” in the fall of 1893, Blind and her friend Mona Caird spent part of the fall living together in a small cottage in Wendover. Blind recorded their experiences together, as well as drafts of poems she wrote during this time, in a Commonplace Book now at the Bodleian Library. Her entries speak of an intimate communion with Caird, both physical and mental. The two women took many walks together through the countryside, where the landscape becomes feminized and eroticized in Blind's imagination:

Blind's descriptions of Caird also carry an erotic charge; recounting a sunny afternoon on a hillside field when a white horse approached them, and “Mona with very soft little touches began patting it+driving the flies away,” Blind adds: Another entry describes an afternoon on this same hillside field when the two are discussing Blind's plans for a new novel, and both are startled by evidence of their mental and emotional intimacy. Blind notes that she “thought of the name ‘Alma Mornington’ for my heroine,” then adds: “the same name came into Mona Caird's head at the same instant. She had actually mentioned it because the name was not a real one but it startled us both. Was it a case of transmission of thought?” (fol. 24).

The first poetic fragments that appear in the Commonplace Book, while not explicitly evoking Caird, express an intimacy that links them with the prose passages that do:

Blind adopts the metaphor of physical communion to describe her attachment in the subsequent stanzas of this fragment, first observing that “All life must taste of thee/for evermore,” then wondering how she will “make +/Keep thee mine/Who verily art the very bread+wine/By which I live” (7–8).

Several of the poems in Blind's 1893 collection Songs and Sonnets give voice to the kind of same-sex desire intimated in Blind's Commonplace Book. “Our Souls Have Touched Each Other,” one of the new poems added to the series “Love in Exile” (which originally appeared in The Ascent of Man), begins by imagining lovers who are “Two fountains from one jet,” then adding: “Like children of one mother/Our leaping thoughts have met” (3–4).²⁰

In the fourth stanza, the speaker suggests that this love dare not speak its name: “A White Night,” from the 1895 volume Birds of Passage, describes an intensely feminised landscape: The lovers lie together in this landscape, “lapped in illimitable light,” nature limning their union: By stressing similarities over differences (between the lovers, and between the lovers and nature) and by refusing to distinguish gendered subject positions, these poems implicitly “dissolve” the way the sexual subject is envisioned within patriarchy. They embody what Maria Pramaggiore has called “bisexual epistemologies”: “Bisexual epistemologies – ways of apprehending, organizing, and intervening in the world that refuse one-to-one correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities, between identification and desire – acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject” (3).²¹ If the project of scientific decadence is to acquire “forbidden” knowledge and experience, much of Blind's late poetry is effectively participating in this project and extending it into the realm of sexuality and sexual identity.

As these and other poems in Songs and Sonnets and Birds of Passage also demonstrate, Blind imagines nature as an ally rather than an enemy of her transgressive ideas – in clear contrast to Arthur Symons and other male decadents. In this sense her sonnet “The Evening of the Year” (originally published in the 31 December 1892 issue of Black and White and reprinted in Songs and Sonnets) is the ur-text of her decadent poetry. Here the obsessiveness, morbidity, and perversity conventionally associated with literary decadence – and the human subject – are projected onto nature itself:

Nature seems diseased here (the word “hectic” in line four denotes symptoms of consumptive fever, which the word “shuddering” in line twelve underscores), but as the fourth line also indicates (where “hectic” takes on its connotations of feverish excitement and activity), this is a temporary condition – illness will give way to health just as evening gives way to morning, just as December gives way to May. Indeed, decay itself is productive – it brings activity and beauty in its wake.²² “The Evening of the Year” simultaneously “naturalizes” decadent forms of representation and envisions them as necessary to rebirth and renewal.

Blind also enlists nature in the service of subversive ideas in “Nûit,” her most radical appropriation of decadent conventions. “Nûit” is the sixth of the “Songs of the Orient” in Birds of Passage, poems that emerged from her 1892–93 travels in Egypt. Blind explains in a note that the title refers to “one of the names for the primeval night of Egyptian mythology,” and then quotes an inscription “cut on the floor of the mummy-case of Mykerinos, the builder of the third great Pyramid: ‘Thy Mother Nûit has spread herself out over thee in her name of Mystery of the Heavens’” (144). In the poem, Blind places Nûit at the center of a revisionist cosmology; as Bonnie J. Robinson has noted, she replaces “the anthropomorphized male god, lord and father of all” with the primeval night of Egyptian mythology – the female source of all religions (4). The poem is also distinctively decadent in its intimations of polymorphously perverse sexuality – here projected onto the entire universe of matter:

Patriarchal religions emerge from these embraces, but they exhibit a tendency toward that “unstable equilibrium” that Arthur Symons identifies in “The Decadent Movement in Literature” as “another form of the maladie fin de siècle” (856): Ultimately, these religions return to embrace their creator, who reappears in the last stanza as a kind of decadent femme fatale on a cosmic scale: Dissolution and death dominate the poem's final stanza, but as in “The Evening of the Year” they are stages in a process of endless recreation; “Night” here is the grave of patriarchal religions, but also the font of undying creative energy – a feminised version of Blake's “Prolific.” This radical and radically re-gendered cosmology is embodied in the poem's metrical structure, which employs feminine rhymes and subverts the conventionally light or comic tone of dimeter verse.

For most literary historians and critics, Blind's association with the decadent movement derives not from any of the poems I have discussed thus far but from a single sonnet, “Sea Music,” the last poem she published in her lifetime. It appeared in the inaugural issue of the Savoy in January 1896, between two love poems by W. B. Yeats and the first part of Aubrey Beardsley's unfinished erotic fantasy Under the Hill. As Blind explains in a note appended to the poem, it emerged from an experience of natural supernaturalism:

The sonnet seems muted and conventional in comparison with “The Evening of the Year,” though its sestet does return to the figurative sea of “Nûit” and strike a characteristically antitheist chord: The Savoy was edited by her friend (and literary executor) Arthur Symons, whose own poetry and criticism defined British decadence for generations of readers. Symons had known Blind since 1888, when she helped gain him entry into literary London, and he had recently become notorious as the author of London Nights, one of the key fin-de-siècle texts, published in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials.²⁴ Blind had admired Symons's poetry since 1888, when she read his contributions to the Rhymer's Club and his first volume, Silhouettes; in 1892, she reportedly announced to an older critic attending one of Ford Madox Brown's salons that Symons was “the coming poet, the Poet of the New Time, for whom we were all looking” (Rhys 111).

Before submitting her sonnet to Symons, Blind sought advice from her friend Richard Garnett, Keeper of Printed Books in the British Library, who responded in a letter dated 9 November 1895. Garnett's counsel is revealing – of his own masculine anxieties, of the reactionary climate engendered by Wilde's conviction, and of the masculinist assumptions governing conceptions of literary decadence in late-century London:

Although Garnett was well aware of – and sympathetic to – Blind's radicalism, he was deaf to the decadent strains in her later poetry, especially the ways in which her appropriations of decadent conventions expressed her subversive ideas about gender and sexuality. His reductive assumptions, about literary decadence generally and about women's poetry, prevented Garnett from taking the full measure of either, or of recognizing the affinities between the two.²⁵ Linda Dowling has argued that British Decadents and New Women writers were allied in their commitment to “breaching the constrictive and defensive walls of Victorian aesthetic decorum and building anew” (449). Like other female aesthetes, Blind would have eschewed identification with either of these groups, yet she developed rich associations with both. The poetry she wrote as a result radiates a “dynamics of transition” (Weir 15) at once unsettling and transformative.