passing by" into mistaking for "graceful rays/[Its] white and melancholy blood" (21: "Sick Moon"). When Pierrot cannot find relief in her customary magic—in the "strange absinthe" of her beams, this "wine that we drink with our eyes" (16: "Moon-Drunk")—he takes pleasure in tormenting his enemies: he makes music by drawing a bow across Cassander's pot-belly (6: "Pierrot's Serenade"); he bores a hole in his skull as a bowl for his pipe (45: "Cruel Pierrot"). (Cassander is a target because he is an "academician" [37: "Pantomime"], a dry-as-dust guardian of the Law.) Madness seems to be lurking at Pierrot's elbow, as when he makes up his face with moonlight (3: "Pierrot-Dandy"), then spends an evening trying to brush a spot of it from his black jacket (38: "Moon-Brusher"). At his most despairing, he is visited by thoughts of his "last mistress"—the gallows (17: "The Song of the Gallows"), at the end of whose rope he dangles in "his white Moon robe" (18: "Suicide"). That the moon, indeed, seems to connive in his extinction is suggested by its sometime appearance as "a white saber/On a somber cushion of watered silk" that threatens to come whistling down on Pierrot's neck (24: "Decapitation"). His consolation is that the art in which he resides will have eternal life: "Beautiful verses are great crosses/On which red Poets bleed" (30: "The Crosses"). The old succor of religion is replaced by that of poetry, but at a cost—and with a difference. What is summoned to "the altar of [these] verses" is not the gentle Mary but the "Madonna of Hysteria", who holds out "to the incredulous universe/[Her] Son, with his limbs already green,/His flesh sagging and decayed" (28: "Evocation"). To the assembled faithful, Pierrot offers his heart: "Like a red and horrible Host/For the cruel Eucharist" (29: "Red Mass"). The new Lamb of God is a consumptive, his Word a confession of both self-sacrifice and impotence. And yet, for all the harshness of this portrait, the tone of the poems lightens considerably towards the end of the cycle. The dance of a "fine pink dust" on the horizon announces the sunrise in poem 41 ("Pink Dust"); Pierrot joins Harlequin and Columbine for a sumptuous repast in poem 48 ("Supper on the Water"); and in one of the last vignettes in which Pierrot appears, he is the possessor of a "bright and joyous lantern" (44: "The Lantern"), marking a