It is a spacious apartment, with gilded pillars and pilasters, and pictured walls and ceilings.

It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the Windows.

I hope my poem is about loss, not nostalgia, that the tenor singing an Italian aria, like the ruined pilasters of the theater, suggests an historical dimension of loss.