Gypsy Verses

Helen Whitney

Helen Hay Whitney

Gypsy Verses

To

G. V. W.

because she is my friend

Acknowledgment is made to Messrs. Harper and Brothers, the Century Company, and the Metropolitan Magazine for courteous permission to reproduce certain of the verses included in this volume.

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.

ATARAH

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.

AGE

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.

LOVE AND DAWN

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.

L’AMOUR AMBIGUEUX

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!

SAPPHICS

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.

SATAN, PRINCE OF DARKNESS

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.

IN PRISON

Above her task the long year through

She works with steady hands,