pox-fouled

Updated: May 13, 2025

And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the pox-fouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again. The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure.

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man