Naked and Active

  For me, the naked and the nude            The nude are bold, the nude are sly 

  (By lexicographers construed              To hold each treasonable eye.

  As synonyms that should express           While draping by a showman's trick

  The same deficiency of dress              Their dishabille in rhetoric,

  Or shelter) stand as wide apart           They grin a mock-religious grin

  As love from lies, or truth from art.     Of scorn at those of naked skin.


  Lovers without reproach will gaze         The naked, therefore, who compete

  On bodies naked and ablaze;               Against the nude may know defeat;

  The Hippocratic eye will see              Yet when they both together tread

  In nakedness, anatomy;                    The briary pastures of the dead,

  And naked shines the Goddess when         By Gorgons with long whips pursued,

  She mounts her lion among men.            How naked go the sometimes nude!