Gypsy Verses. Whitney Helen Hay

      Oh, you were not so idle—

      You wore a sprig of green;

      You wore a feather in your cap,

      The reddest ever seen.

      Your face was laughing gypsy brown,

      Your eyes were of the blue;

      You wandered up and down the world,

      For you had much to do.

      For oh, you were not idle,

      Whatever men might say—

      You made the colour of the year

      Magnificent and gay.

      With painted slender folded hands

      She waited what might come,

      Her head was tyred with jewelled bands,

      Her mouth was sweet and dumb.

      Her cymar was of ardassine,

      Fire red from throat to hem,

      Broidered with Turkis stones therein—

      She gave her soul for them.

      Faint cassia and love-haunted myrrh

      Made perilous her hair,

      And what was Sidon’s woe to her

      Whose face was king’s despair?

      Nor life nor love from those cold lips,

      But ah, in what degree,

      Her passionate lover leans and sips

      Her death-bright poesy.

      Blindness, and women wailing on white seas,

      Seas where no placid sails have ever been,

      Dreams like wan demons on waste marshes seen

      Thro’ dulling, fevered eyes. The dregs and lees

      Of wine long spilt to dead divinities.

      Grey, empty days when Spring is never green,

      Can the heart answer what these riddles mean—

      Can the life hold such hopelessness as these?

      Love lying low in the long pleasant grass,

      Youth with his eager face against the sun,

      They may not guess the hours when these shall pass,

      In what drear coin such lovely dreams are paid,

      At what grim cost their flowery days are won,

      When man is old and lonely and afraid.

      Dawn shaking long light pennons in the East—

      Is love the least

      And love the greatest of the morning’s woes?

      See how the rose

      Breaks in a hundred petals down the sky.

      Darkness must die,

      And in the heart, where flutters sad desire,

      Wakes the new fire

      Silver and azure of the open day.

      So, grief, away!

      We will be glad with flagons, drown old pain,

      And Dawn shall bring us to her own again.

      You are the dreams we do not dare to dream,

      The dim florescence of a mystic rose,

      In poverty or pride love comes and goes,

      We do not question what the deeps may seem

      Launched on the steady current of the stream.

      Gaily and hardily we hear the prose;

      In youth, red sun, in age the charnel snows.

      Nor see the banks where subtle flowers gleam,

      In green sweet beds of moly and of thyme

      Wild as an errant fancy. All the while

      We know you, mystic rose; we know your smile,

      Your deep, still eyes, your fragrant floating hair,

      The peacock purple of the gown you wear,

      O lyric alchemist of rune and rhyme!

      Leave the Vine, Ah Love, and the wreath of myrtle,

      Leave the Song, to die, on the lips of laughter,

      Come, for love is faint with the choric measure,

      Weary of waiting.

      Down the sky in lines of pellucid amber

      Blows the hair of her whom the gods have treasured,

      Fair, more fair is mine in the ring of maidens,

      Mine for the taking.

      I sinned, but gloriously. I bore the fall

      From Heaven’s high places as becomes a king.

      I did not shrink before the utmost sting

      Of torture or of banishment. The pall

      Of Dis, I cried, should be the hall

      Where sad proud men of men should meet and sing

      The woes of that defeat ambitions bring

      Hurled from the last vain fight against the wall.

      I thought I had been punished. To forego

      All lovely sights, the whisper of fresh rain,

      To brood forever endlessly on pain

      Yet still a Prince, Ah God, I dreamed,—and then

      I learned my Fate, this wandering to and fro

      In Devil’s work among the sons of men.

      Above her task the long year through

      She works with steady hands,

      The while her heart is tired with dreams

      Which no man understands.

      For long and long ago she knew

      Green trees and open sky,

      Before the law condemned her days

      To doom until she die.

      And so she dreams in mystic peace,

      Indifferent to the scene,

      Because her heart retains and knows

      The little stain of green.

      The long lost lights of love I know,

      They thrill from ultimate space, they blow

      Like small bewildered stars, tossed high

      On some unknown and passionate sky.

      I