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I. PEACE to the odalisque, the facile slave, | |
| Whose unrespective love rewards the brave, | |
| Or cherishes the coward; she who yields | |
| Her lord the fief of waste, uncultured fields | |
| To fester in non-using; she whose hour | 5 |
| Is measured by her beauty’s transient flower; | |
| Who lives in man, as he in God, and dies | |
| His parasite, who shuts her from the skies. | |
| Graceful ephemera! Fair morning dream | |
| Of the young world! In vain would women’s hearts, | 10 |
| In love with sacrifice, withstand the stream | |
| Of human progress; other spheres, new parts | |
| Await them. God be with them in their quest— | |
| Our brave, sad working-women of the West. | |
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II. Peace to the odalisque, whose morning glory | 15 |
| Is vanishing, to be alone in story; | |
| Firm in her place, a dull-robed figure stands, | |
| With wistful eyes, and earnest, grappling hands: | |
| The working-woman, she whose soul and brain— | |
| Her tardy right—are bought with honest pain. | 20 |
| Oh woman! sacrifice may still be thine— | |
| More fruitful than the souls ye did resign | |
| To sated masters; from your lives, so real, | |
| Will shape itself a pure and high ideal, | |
| That ye will seek with sad, wide-open eyes, | 25 |
| Till, finding nowhere, baffled love shall rise | |
| To higher planes, where passion may look pale, | |
| But charity’s white light shall never fail. | |
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