the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe,
_At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. The dramatist comes to London as
a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His
innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman:

In her treacherous eyes,
As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam,
Here did he see his own eternal skies.

But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her
revelation of her character:

Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay,
Wedded and one with it, he moaned.
* * * * *
Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to trace
Deep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew,
Then--spat his hatred in her smiling face.

It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that
he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen
woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into
forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan
only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller's _The Ideal and the
Real_ is an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into
this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet
idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti's
_Jenny_, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem,
_A Vision of Woman_. [Footnote: See also Kirke White, _The Prostitute_;
Whitman, _To a Common Prostitute_; Joaquin Miller, _A Dove of St. Mark_;
and Olive Dargan, _A Magdalen to Her Poet_.]

To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious
denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is
purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes
with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's _Non Sum
Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae_:

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion;
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of
his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May
Sinclair's novel, _The Divine Fire_, who is irresistibly impelled
to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her
touching a book belonging to hi