Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

By The Street-Children’s Dance

Mathilde Blind (1841–1896)

NOW the earth in fields and hills

Stirs with pulses of the Spring,

Nest embowering hedges ring

With interminable trills;

Sunlight runs a race with rain,

All the world grows young again.

Young as at the hour of birth:

From the grass the daisies rise

With the dew upon their eyes,

Sun-awakened eyes of earth;

Fields are set with cups of gold;

Can this budding world grow old?

Can the world grow old and sere,

Now when ruddy-tasselled trees

Stoop to every passing breeze,

Rustling in their silken gear;

Now when blossoms pink and white

Have their own terrestrial light?

Brooding light falls soft and warm,

Where in many a wind-rocked nest,

Curled up ’neath the she-bird’s breast

Clustering eggs are hid from harm;

While the mellow-throated thrush

Warbles in the purpling bush.

Misty purple bathes the Spring:

Swallows flashing here and there

Float and dive on waves of air,

And make love upon the wing;

Crocus-buds in sheaths of gold

Burst like sunbeams from the mould.

Chestnut leaflets burst their buds,

Perching tiptoe on each spray,

Springing toward the radiant day,

As the bland, pacific floods

Of the generative sun

All the teeming earth o’errun.

Can this earth run o’er with beauty,

Laugh through leaf and flower and grain,

While in close-pent court and lane,

In the air so thick and sooty,

Little ones pace to and fro,

Weighted with their parents’ woe?

Woe-predestined little ones!

Putting forth their buds of life

In an atmosphere of strife,

And crime-breeding ignorance;

Where the bitter surge of care

Freezes to a dull despair.

Dull despair and misery

Lie about them from their birth

Ugly curses, uglier mirth,

Are their earliest lullaby;

Fathers have they without name,

Mothers crushed by want and shame.

Brutish, overburthened mothers,

With their hungry children cast

Half-nude to the nipping-blast;

Little sisters with their brothers

Dragging in their arms all day

Children nigh as big as they.

Children mothered by the street:

Shouting, flouting, roaring after

Passers-by with gibes and laughter,

Diving between horses’ feet,

In and out of drays and barrows,

Recklessly like London sparrows.

Mudlarks of our slums and alleys,

All unconscious of the blooming

World behind those housetops looming,

Of the happy fields and valleys,

Of the miracle of Spring

With its boundless blossoming.

Blossoms of humanity!

Poor soiled blossoms in the dust!

Through the thick defiling crust

Of soul-stifling poverty,

In your features may be traced

Childhood’s beauty half effaced—

Childhood, stunted in the shadow

Of the light-debarring walls:

Not for you the cuckoo calls

O’er the silver-threaded meadow;

Not for you the lark on high

Pours his music from the sky.

Ah! you have your music too!

And come flocking round that player

Grinding at his organ there,

Summer-eyed and swart of hue,

Rattling off his well-worn tune

On this April afternoon.

Lovely April lights of pleasure

Flit o’er want-beclouded features

Of these little outcast creatures,

As they swing with rhythmic measure,

In the courage of their rags,

Lightly o’er the slippery flags.

Little footfalls, lightly glancing

In a luxury of motion,

Supple as the waves of ocean

In your elemental dancing,

How you fly, and wheel, and spin,

For your hearts, too, dance within.

Dance along with mirth and laughter,

Buoyant, fearless, and elate,

Dancing in the teeth of fate,

Ignorant of your hereafter,

That with all its tragic glooms

Blindly on your future looms.

Past and future, hence away!

Joy, diffused throughout the earth,

Centre in this moment’s mirth

Of ecstatic holiday:

Once in all their lives’ dark story,

Touch them, Fate! with April glory.