As we have seen, Symons uses the idiom of the metropolis to mediate his Decadent poetics of ‘strangeness’, fracture and fragmentation, Impressionist perspectives, metafictional tropes and metaphors, fetishism, self-reflexion and metonymy. This vast platform of artificiality behaves as a text in which meaning and poetic feeling have frozen into a tangled maze of brilliant stylistic effects. For Symons this is the framework in which the senses invade artifice. As the poems move from the hazy outdoors conurbation to the interiority of dance-halls and private rooms, especially in London Nights, they close in and up on the sex act. If the city is a metaphor for the poetic text, there is a third parameter in the equation: the sexualised female body that behaves both as a text (or artwork, either musical or painterly) and as a city, or as a city synecdoche. As I will illustrate, the city in Decadence is often perceived as a seductive woman as much as the woman's flesh in the sex act is a miniature of the city and its mazy patterns. The women that populate Symons’ poems are manikin-like, instruments of sexual gratification yet aesthetic objects, just like Wilde's Athena's statue, Charmides, Salome, the Sphinx, Ammon and the automata of ‘The Harlot's House’. As Symons stresses in ‘Perdition’, the ultimate tactility of flesh matches the Decadent's ‘learned desires’ and returns a ‘nervous vibration’, just like the ‘stringed lute’ of Wilde's ‘Helas!’. Enslaved by materialism, the thrill electrifies ‘Death into life’, an inversion of Keats’ Romantic adage of Apollo's dying into life. Symons’ speakers do not quite merge but collide with bodies that are synonymic to both deathly flesh and living artwork in a never-ending cycle of sterile excess.

Nerves

The Decadent poets’ endless futile quests into either gross materialism or finely spun fantasies lead to a certain post-Romantic restlessness and agitation, and to moods and states of a more disturbing nature than those experienced by their Aestheticist brethren, who cherish Beauty but do not enter its dangerous and threatening territories.