There’s more fun in them than you’d expect 
what with the pan-piping, tambourine- 
waggling, castanet-snapping, goose-honking 
and dog-barking.  It’s all a celebration, 
punctuated sometimes by sobriety,
seasoned with a nearly tender sensuality.  
But, really, they’re meant for dancing.  Even 
the most bombastic movements, the ones 
with kettle drums and horns, call up a 
choreographed procession and studied steps.  

Le Roi Soleil’s court painters smeared whole
bolts of canvas with tableaux-vivants  
displaying the court gotten up as ersatz 
would-be ancients in togas, chitons, buskins.  
These are fun too, or funny, the privileged 
faces simpering and unmistakably 
French, the whole masquerade undermined by 
Le Roi, tous les ducs, duchesses, les comtes, 
comtesses, et même les petites enfants 
sporting those long, de-lousable wigs.  

Is it a rule that the past’s decadence should
seem nobler than that of the present,
that Versailles feels classier than Versace,  
Trajan’s Market less tacky than Rodeo Drive? 
Maybe if the art of the imperially
privileged is good enough—Greek, Roman, French—
depravity dissolves, foppery fades,
and even the most bloated pompousness, 
redeemed by the patina of centuries,
can come to feel like something dignified. 

These days, Delalande, democratized, streams for cheap.