The Hotel
The long resounding marble corridors, the shining parlors with shining women in them.
The French room, with its gilt and garlands under plump little tumbling painted loves.
The Turkish room, with its jumble of many carpets and its stiffly squared un-Turkish chairs.
The English room, all heavy crimson and gold, with spreading palms lifted high in round green tubs.
The electric lights in twos and threes and hundreds, made into festoons and spirals and arabesques, a maze and magic of bright persistent radiance.
The people sitting in corners by twos and threes, and cooing together under the glare.
The long rows of silent people In chairs, watching with eyes that see not while the patient band tangles the air with music.
The bell-boys marching in with cards, and shouting names over and over into ears that do not heed.
The stout and gorgeous dowagers In lacy white and lilac, bedizened with many jewels, with smart little scarlet or azure hats on their gray-streaked hair.
The business men in trim and spotless suits, who walk In and out with eager steps, or sit at the desks and tables, or watch the shining women.
The telephone girls forever listening to far voices, with the silver band over their hair and the little black caps obliterating their ears.
The telegraph tickers sounding their perpetual chit-chit-chit from the uttermost ends of the earth.
The waiters. In black swallow-tails and white aprons, passing here and there with trays of bottles and glasses.
The quiet and sumptuous bar-room, with purplish men softly drinking in little alcoves, while the bar-keeper, mixing bright liquors, is rapidly plying his bottles.
The great bedecked and gilded cafe, with its glitter of a thousand mirrors, with its little white tables bearing gluttonous dishes whereto bright forks, held by pampered hands, flicker daintily back and forth.
The white-tiled, immaculate kitchen, with many little round blue fires, where white-clad cooks are making spiced and flavored dishes.
The cool cellars filled with meats and fruits, or layered with sealed and bottled wines mellowing softly in the darkness.
The invisible stories of furnaces and machines, burrowing deep down into the earth, where grimy workmen are heavily laboring.
The many-windowed stories of little homes and shelters and sleeping-places, reaching up into the night like some miraculous, high-piled honeycomb of wax-white cells.
The clothes inside of the cells — the stuffs, the silks, the laces; the elaborate delicate disguises that wait in trunks and drawers and closets, or bedrape and conceal human flesh.
The people inside of the clothes, the bodies white and young, bodies fat and bulging, bodies wrinkled and wan, all alike veiled by fine fabrics, sheltered by walls and roofs, shut in from the sun and stars.
The souls inside of the bodies — the naked souls; souls weazened and weak, or proud and brave; all imprisoned in flesh, wrapped in woven stuffs, enclosed in thick and painted masonry, shut away with many shadows from the shining truth.
God inside of the souls, God veiled and wrapped and imprisoned and shadowed in fold on fold of flesh and fabrics and mockeries; but ever alive, struggling and rising again, seeking the light, freeing the world.
from You and I, by Harriet Monroe
New York: The Macmillian Company, 1914
This poem is Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel in miniature, with all the glittering details of a big city hotel in an era when they were the great crossroads of social and business life for those who could afford the price of entry. And I love that last line, which to me captures what is going on in most of us every day, whatever name or spirit we associate with God.
Available on the Internet Archive: Link
This is one in a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.
That last line–a touch of Gnosticism there.