Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Crosby

It is romance staged as bondage, pitched with a decadent grin. Crosby doesn’t reach for flowers or vows; he commissions hardware. The “village blacksmith” drags passion out of the drawing room and into the forge, where desire is loud, hot, and permanent. Golden chains are a flex and a threat at once: wealth turned into restraint, luxury recast as captivity. Even the choice of “ankles” matters. It’s not just hearts linked; it’s bodies controlled, movement limited, a shared gait imposed.

Then he switches materials and tone: “gay ribbons” spiral into an almost comic excess. The repetition - “around and around and around…” - performs obsession in real time, mimicking the breathless loop of infatuation and the compulsive return of erotic fantasy. It’s a sentence that tightens as it goes, like the ribbon it describes. The ribbons soften the violence of the chain, but they don’t undo it; they camouflage it in celebration, turning coercion into pageantry.

Crosby’s context sharpens the edge. A wealthy American expatriate in Paris, tied to the interwar “lost generation” orbit, he wrote with a sun-bright fatalism: love and death as twin addictions, commitment as an aesthetic stunt. This is less a plea for mutual intimacy than a manifesto of possession dressed up as art. The subtext is the era’s glamourous self-destruction: make devotion total, make it visible, make it irreversible - because moderation feels like a kind of poverty.