marmoreal /mar-MOR-ee-əl/. adjective. Resembling or made of marble. Cold, hard and smooth. If I spun wax, I’d be DJ Marmoreal. From Latin marmor (marble).
“Eyes brimming o’er and brow bowed down with lovey
Marmoreal neck and bosom uberous…
(Robert Browning)
“And to my surprise, I was comforted. Somehow, the great Nobodaddy in the sky reached down a marmoreal hand and laid it on my burning brow and soothed me.” (John Banville)
“God, she looked huge. Her crimson, purple wings, in flight, obscured the roof-tree of the Imperial Circus. Yet those marmoreal, immense arms and legs of hers, as they made leisurely, swimming movements through the air, looked palely unconvincing, as if arbitrarily tacked on to the bird attire.” (Angela Carter)
“I am always the youngest; the most naïvely surprised; the one who runs in advance in apprehension and sympathy with discomfort or ridicule — should there be a smut on a nose, or a button undone. I suffer for all humiliations. Yet I am also ruthless, marmoreal.” (Virginia Woolf)
“Menard’s true friends have greeted that catalog with alarm, and even with a degree of sadness. One might note that only yesterday were we gathered before his marmoreal place of rest, among the dreary cypresses, and already Error is attempting to tarnish his bright Memory…” (Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley)
“She doesn’t consider them suitable for wedging clay, with their puny little biceps and match-stick wrists, so poorly developed compared with her own solid, smoothly muscled arms and broad, capable but shapely hands, so often admired by the poets. Marmoreal, one of them said – wrote, actually – causing Loulou to make one of her frequent sorties into the dictionary, to find out whether or not she’d been insulted.” (Margaret Atwood)
“Who is the man? The body is as perfectly formed as a god’s. But it gives off such marmoreal coldness that it is impossible a child in its grasp could not be chilled to the bone. As for the face, the face will not be seen.” (J.M. Coetzee)
“This poem—‘Death & Co.’—is about the double or schizophrenic nature of death—the marmoreal coldness of Blake’s death mask, say, hand in glove with the fearful softness of worms, water and the other katabolists. I imagine these two aspects of death as two men, two business friends, who have come to call.” (Sylvia Plath)
Elsewhere: Wordnik.