What thou art, we know not;
What is thee most like?
Snakes tied in a bow-knot?
Stovepipes on a strike?
Or Bellevue inmates on a Suffrage hike!

We look before and after,
And pine thy face to see;
Our sincerest laughter
Is aroused by thee.
Art thou perchance the sad cube root of 23?

Mr. R. Kipling felt a flash of his old fire, and threw in a high speed:

On an old symbolic staircase,
Looking forty ways at once;
There's a Cubist Nude descending,
With the queerest sort of stunts.
For the staircase is a-falling,
And the Noodle seems to say:
"Though you hear my soul a-calling,
You can't see me, anyway!"

Oh, this symbol balderdash,
And this post-Impression trash;
Can't you see their paint a-chunkin in a hotchy-potchy splash?
Where the motives bold and brash
Of the Cubist painters clash,
And the Nude descends like thunder down a staircase gone to smash!

Mr. D.G. Rossetti, ever a sweet singer, warbled thus tunefully:

The Blessed Nude at eve leaned out
From the gold staircase rail;
Her paint was deeper than the depth
Of waters in a pail.
She wore three bonnets on her heads,
And seven coats of mail.

And still she bowed herself and swayed
In circling cubic charms.
And the pigments of her painted soul
Were loud as war's alarms.
But the staircase lay as if asleep
Along her fourteen arms.

(I saw her move!) But soon her path
Was cubes instead of spheres;
And then she disappeared among
The staircase barriers;
And, after she was gone, I saw
She'd wept some large paint tears!

Mr. R. Browning found the subject greatly to his liking:

Who will may hear the Staircase story told;
All its blobs, splotches, facets,--what you will;
The vague Nude, compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred stairs,
Dizzily plunging with tumultuous glee!
Whirling the stairdust, hazarding oblique,
The moon safe in her pocket! See she treads
Cool citric crystals, fierce pyropus stone;
While crushing sunbeams in a triple line
Smirk at the insane roses in her hair,
And Strojavacca, frowning, looks asquint
To see that trick of toe,--that dizened heel,--
As she, the somewhat, hangs 'twixt naught and naught.
A perfect Then,--a sub-potential Now--
A facile and slabsided centipede.

And here is Mr. B. Jonson's little jingle:

Still to be cubed, still to be squ