My name is Jezebel Mort: you know the thing that that means;
If ever one comes into Court, they call us pleasure-machines.
Aye, for men were we made, and men were made for our sex:
Sordid and base our trade; there's more than our trade to vex
Even such simple souls with the thought of life and of death:
For the devil, we know, plays bowls, and can whistle away our breath.
Nay, none were born a saint, for we were born on the earth
To be tainted by sin's taint; some girls of us even from birth
Had it just in their blood: sin, the veritable sin,
That drenches one in the mud, up from the knee to chin,
And leaves another a slut, base-born of a chimney-sweep:
Heaven knows the reason, but angels never did weep.
I was born in a room in a hideous bawdy-house,
Conceived in my mother's womb on the midnight of some carouse;
That was likely enough. No sooner was I of age
To know the price of the stuff that such as we know as the wage
Paid in money or lust, than I walked in the Street;
Flesh and bones, and a pinch of dust, and at last a winding-sheet!
Then comes, after this, drink, and drink one finds quite nice;
Then or before, I think, was one's absolute knowledge of vice:
Vice in the nature of us. Yes, in the innocent ones,
Just as calamitous, as vice in the veins of their sons.
Vice, I tell you, is in all; is a virtue to some, perhaps.
We, girls after our fall, are caught in sinister traps,
Just as they snare the birds; for brute men are snares, I say,
Not in their uttered words, but men-devils cast in our way
By the fiends in hell; aye, for their fiendish luxury.
Well, we are all to sell: one for her beauty, you see,
One for the lust of her eyes: these for their sensual lips;
And for other things men prize more than one's casual slips.
One of us maybe gives herself as a very slave
To the man for whom she lives; and before her one digs a grave.
But for all that one thinks of one's heart (that beats on the left side).
We are sold in the mart, where men bargain from eventide
Till the very Judgment-Day; so one imagines, at least.
Now in the hospital grey, whose walls were built by no priest,
Where, a white glare shines in on one's very self in one's bed,
Drifting over one's skin, touching the hair on one's head;
Well, there's an end for me; just perhaps, where, there, nod
Branches of a barren tree: and, this night, I go to my God.
Moll Boswell.
Dead she is as the just, she that walked in the street:
Flesh and bones, and a pinch of dust, and at last a winding sheet!
