Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By The Spanish Gypsy (1864–8) (From Book I)

George Eliot (Mary Ann Cross) (1819–1880)

THE LONG notes linger on the trembling air,

With subtle penetration enter all

The myriad corridors of the passionate soul,

Message-like spread, and answering action rouse.

Not angular jigs that warm the chilly limbs

In hoary northern mists, but action curved

To soft andante strains pitched plaintively.

Vibrations sympathetic stir all limbs:

Old men live backward in their dancing prime,

And move in memory; small legs and arms

With pleasant agitation purposeless

Go up and down like pretty fruits in gales.

All long in common for the expressive act

Yet wait for it; as in the olden time

Men waited for the bard to tell their thought.

“The dance! the dance!” is shouted all around.

Now Pablo lifts the bow, Pepíta now,

Ready as bird that sees the sprinkled corn,

When Juan nods and smiles, puts forth her foot

And lifts her arm to wake the castanets.

Juan advances, too, from out the ring

And bends to quit his lute; for now the scene

Is empty; Roldan weary, gathers pence,

Followed by Annibal with purse and stick.

The carpet lies a coloured isle untrod,

Inviting feet: “The dance, the dance,” resounds,

The bow entreats with slow melodic strain,

And all the air with expectation yearns.

Sudden, with gliding motion like a flame

That through dim vapour makes a path of glory,

A figure lithe, all white and saffron-robed,

Flashed right across the circle, and now stood

With ripened arms uplift and regal head,

Like some tall flower whose dark and intense heart

Lies half within a tulip-tinted cup.

Juan stood fixed and pale; Pepíta stepped

Backward within the ring; the voices fell

From shouts insistent to more passive tones

Half meaning welcome, half astonishment.

“Lady Fedalma!—will she dance for us?”

But she, sole swayed by impulse passionate,

Feeling all life was music and all eyes

The warming quickening light that music makes,

Moved as, in dance religious, Miriam,

When on the Red Sea shore she raised her voice

And led the chorus of the people’s joy;

Or as the Trojan maids that reverent sang

Watching the sorrow-crownéd Hecuba:

Moved in slow curves voluminous, gradual,

Feeling and action flowing into one,

In Eden’s natural taintless marriage-bond;

Ardently modest, sensuously pure,

With young delight that wonders at itself

And throbs as innocent as opening flowers,

Knowing not comment—soilless, beautiful.

The spirit in her gravely glowing face

With sweet community informs her limbs,

Filling their fine gradation with the breath

Of virgin majesty; as full vowelled words

Are new impregnate with the master’s thought.

Even the chance-strayed delicate tendrils black,

That backward ’scape from out her wreathing hair—

Even the pliant folds that cling transverse

When with obliquely soaring bend altern

She seems a goddess quitting earth again—

Gather expression—a soft undertone

And resonance exquisite from the grand chord

Of her harmoniously bodied soul.

At first a reverential silence guards

The eager senses of the gazing crowd:

They hold their breath, and live by seeing her.

But soon the admiring tension finds relief—

Sighs of delight, applausive murmurs low,

And stirrings gentle as of earéd corn

Or seed-bent grasses, when the ocean’s breath

Spreads landward. Even Juan is impelled

By the swift-travelling movement: fear and doubt

Give way before the hurrying energy;

He takes his lute and strikes in fellowship,

Filling more full the rill of melody

Raised ever and anon to clearest flood

By Pablo’s voice, that dies away too soon,

Like the sweet blackbird’s fragmentary chant,

Yet wakes again, with varying rise and fall,

In songs that seem emergent memories

Prompting brief utterance—little cancións

And villancicos, Andalusia-born.

It was in the prime

Of the sweet Spring-time,

In the linnet’s throat

Trembled the love-note,

And the love-stirred air

Thrilled the blossoms there.

Little shadows danced

Each a tiny elf,

Happy in large light

And the thinnest self.

It was but a minute

In a far-off Spring,

But each gentle thing,

Sweetly-wooing linnet,

Soft-thrilled hawthorn tree,

Happy shadowy elf

With the thinnest self,

Lives still on in me.

O the sweet, sweet prime

Of the past Spring-time!

And still the light is changing: high above

Float soft pink clouds; others with deeper flush

Stretch like flamingos bending toward the south.

Comes a more solemn brilliance o’er the sky,

A meaning more intense upon the air—

The inspiration of the dying day.

And Juan now, when Pablo’s notes subside,

Soothes the regretful ear, and breaks the pause

With masculine voice in deep antiphony.

Day is dying! Float, O song,

Down the westward river,

Requiem chanting to the Day—

Day, the mighty Giver.

Pierced by shafts of Time he bleeds,

Melted rubies sending

Through the river and the sky,

Earth and heaven blending;

All the long-drawn earthy banks

Up to cloud-land lifting:

Slow between them drifts the swan,

’Twixt two heavens drifting.

Wings half open, like a flow’r

Inly deeper flushing,

Neck and breast as virgin’s pure—

Virgin proudly blushing.

Day is dying! Float, O swan,

Down the ruby river;

Follow, song, in requiem

To the mighty Giver.

The exquisite hour, the ardour of the crowd,

The strains more plenteous, and the gathering might

Of action passionate where no effort is,

But self’s poor gates open to rushing power

That blends the inward ebb and outward vast—

All gathering influences culminate

And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,

Life a glad trembling on the outer edge

Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves,

Filling the measure with a double beat

And widening circle; now she seems to glow

With more declared presence, glorified,

Circling, she lightly bends and lifts on high

The multitudinous-sounding tambourine,

And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher

Stretching her left arm beauteous; now the crowd

Exultant shouts, forgetting poverty

In the rich moment of possessing her.