<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116225" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Flight of the Duchess</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You're my friend:<br>I was the man the Duke spoke to;<br>I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too;<br>So here's the tale from beginning to end,<br>My friend!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ours is a great wild country:<br>If you climb to our castle's top,<br>I don't see where your eye can stop;<br>For when you've passed the cornfield country,<br>Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed,<br>And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,<br>And cattle-tract to open-chase,<br>And open-chase to the very base<br>Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace,<br>Round about, solemn and slow,<br>One by one, row after row,<br>Up and up the pine-trees go,<br>So, like black priests up, and so<br>Down the other side again<br>To another greater, wilder country,<br>That's one vast red drear burnt-up plain,<br>Branched through and through with many a vein<br>Whence iron's dug, and copper's dealt;<br>Look right, look left, look straight before—<br>Beneath they mine, above they smelt,<br>Copper-ore and iron-ore,<br>And forge and furnace mould and melt,<br>And so on, more and ever more,<br>Till at the last, for a bounding belt,<br>Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea shore<br>—And the whole is our Duke's country.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>III</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I was born the day this present Duke was—<br>(And O, says the song, ere I was old!)<br>In the castle where the other Duke was—<br>(When I was happy and young, not old!)<br>I in the kennel, he in the bower:<br>We are of like age to an hour.<br>My father was huntsman in that day;<br>Who has not heard my father say<br>That, when a boar was brought to bay,<br>Three times, four times out of five,<br>With his huntspear he'd contrive<br>To get the killing-place transfixed,<br>And pin him true, both eyes betwixt?<br>And that's why the old Duke would rather<br>He lost a salt-pit than my father,<br>And loved to have him ever in call;<br>That's why my father stood in the hall<br>When the old Duke brought his infant out<br>To show the people, and while they passed<br>The wondrous bantling round about,<br>Was first to start at the outside blast<br>As the Kaiser's courier blew his horn<br>Just a month after the babe was born.<br>"And," quoth the Kaiser's courier," since<br>The Duke has got an heir, our Prince<br>Needs the Duke's self at his side:"<br>The Duke looked down and seemed to wince,<br>But he thought of wars o'er the world wide,<br>Castles a-fire, men on their march,<br>The toppling tower, the crashing arch;<br>And up he looked, and awhile he eyed<br>The row of crests and shields and banners<br>Of all achievements after all manners,<br>And "ay," said the Duke with a surly pride.<br>The more was his comfort when he died<br>At next year's end, in a velvet suit,<br>With a gilt glove on his hand, his foot<br>In a silken shoe for a leather boot,<br>Petticoated like a herald,<br>In a chamber next to an ante-room,<br>Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,<br>What he called stink, and they, perfume:<br>—They should have set him on red Berold<br>Mad with pride, like fire to manage!<br>They should have got his cheek fresh tannage<br>Such a day as to-day in the merry sunshine!<br>Had they stuck on his fist a rough-foot merlin!<br>(Hark, the wind's on the heath at its game!<br>Oh for a noble falcon-lanner<br>To flap each broad wing like a banner,<br>And turn in the wind, and dance like flame!)<br>Had they broached a white-beer cask from Berlin<br>—Or if you incline to prescribe mere wine<br>Put to his lips, when they saw him pine,<br>A cup of our own Moldavia fine,<br>Cotnar for instance, green as May sorrel<br>And ropy with sweet—we shall not quarrel.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>IV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So, at home, the sick tall yellow Duchess<br>Was left with the infant in her clutches,<br>She being the daughter of God knows who:<br>And now was the time to revisit her tribe.<br>Abroad and afar they went, the two,<br>And let our people rail and gibe<br>At the empty hall and extinguished fire,<br>As loud as we liked, but ever in vain,<br>Till after long years we had our desire,<br>And back came the Duke and his mother again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>V</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And he came back the pertest little ape<br>That ever affronted human shape;<br>Full of his travel, struck at himself.<br>You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?<br>—Not he! For in Paris they told the elf<br>Our rough North land was the Land of Lays,<br>The one good thing left in evil days;<br>Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time,<br>And only in wild nooks like ours<br>Could you taste of it yet as in its prime,<br>And see true castles, with proper towers,<br>Young-hearted women, old-minded men,<br>And manners now as manners were then.<br>So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,<br>This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;<br>'Twas not for the joy's self, but the joy of his showing it,<br>Nor for the pride's self, but the pride of our seeing it,<br>He revived all usages thoroughly worn-out,<br>The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out:<br>And chief in the chase his neck he perilled<br>On a lathy horse, all legs and length,<br>With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;<br>—They should have set him on red Berold<br>With the red eye slow consuming in fire,<br>And the thin stiff ear like an abbey-spire!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:<br>And out of a convent, at the word,<br>Came the lady, in time of spring.<br>—Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling!<br>That day, I know, with a dozen oaths<br>I clad myself in thick hunting-clothes<br>Fit for the chase of urochs or buffle<br>In winter-time when you need to muffle.<br>But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure,<br>And so we saw the lady arrive:<br>My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!<br>She was the smallest lady alive,<br>Made in a piece of nature's madness,<br>Too small, almost, for the life and gladness<br>That over-filled her, as some hive<br>Out of the bears' reach on the high trees<br>Is crowded with its safe merry bees:<br>In truth, she was not hard to please!<br>Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,<br>Straight at the castle, that's best indeed<br>To look at from outside the walls:<br>As for us, styled the " serfs and thralls,"<br>She as much thanked me as if she had said it,<br>(With her eyes, do you understand?)<br>Because I patted her horse while I led it;<br>And Max, who rode on her other hand,<br>Said, no bird flew past but she inquired<br>What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired—<br>If that was an eagle she saw hover,<br>And the green and grey bird on the field was the plover.<br>When suddenly appeared. the Duke:<br>And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed<br>On to my hand,—as with a rebuke,<br>And as if his backbone were not jointed,<br>The Duke stepped rather aside than forward<br>And welcomed her with his grandest smile;<br>And, mind you, his mother all the while<br>Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor'ward;<br>And up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies<br>Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis;<br>And, like a glad sky the north-wind sullies,<br>The lady's face stopped its play,<br>As if her first hair had grown grey;<br>For such things must begin some one day.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In a day or two she was well again;<br>As who should say, "You labour in vain!<br>This is all a jest against God, who meant<br>I should ever be, as I am, content<br>And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be."<br>So, smiling as at first went she.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VIII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She was active, stirring, all fire—<br>Could not rest, could not tire—<br>To a stone she might have given life!<br>(I myself loved once, in my day)<br>—For a shepherd's, miner's, huntsman's wife,<br>(I had a wife, I know what I say)<br>Never in all the world such an one!<br>And here was plenty to be done,<br>And she that could do it, great or small,<br>She was to do nothing at all.<br>There was already this man in his post,<br>This in his station, and that in his office,<br>And the Duke's plan admitted a wife, at most,<br>To meet his eye, with the other trophies,<br>Now outside the hall, now in it,<br>To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen,<br>At the proper place in the proper minute,<br>And die away the life between.<br>And it was amusing enough, each infraction<br>Of rule—(but for after-sadness that came)<br>To hear the consummate self-satisfaction<br>With which the young Duke and the old dame<br>Would let her advise, and criticise,<br>And, being a fool, instruct the wise,<br>And, child-like, parcel out praise or blame:<br>They bore it all in complacent guise,<br>As though an artificer, after contriving<br>A wheel-work image as if it were living,<br>Should find with delight it could motion to strike him!<br>So found the Duke, and his mother like him:<br>The lady hardly got a rebuff—<br>That had not been contemptuous enough,<br>With his cursed smirk, as he nodded applause,<br>And kept off the old mother-cat's claws.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>IX</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So, the little lady grew silent and thin,<br>Paling and ever paling,<br>As the way is with a hid chagrin;<br>And the Duke perceived that she was ailing,<br>And said in his heart, "'Tis done to spite me,<br>But I shall find in my power to right me!"<br>Don't swear, friend! The old one, many a year,<br>Is in hell, and the Duke's self . . . you shall hear.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>X</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,<br>When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,<br>A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice<br>That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice,<br>Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold,<br>And another and another, and faster and faster<br>Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled:<br>Then it so chanced that the Duke our master<br>Asked himself what were the pleasures in season,<br>And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty,<br>He should do the Middle Age no treason<br>In resolving on a hunting-party.<br>Always provided, old books showed the way of it!<br>What meant old poets by their strictures?<br>And when old poets had said their say of it,<br>How taught old painters in their pictures?<br>We must revert to the proper channels,<br>Workings in tapestry, paintings on panels,<br>And gather up woodcraft's authentic traditions:<br>Here was food for our various ambitions,<br>As on each case, exactly stated—<br>To encourage your dog, now, the properest chirrup<br>Or best prayer to Saint Hubert on mounting your stirrup—<br>We of the household took thought and debated.<br>Blessed was he whose back ached with the jerkin<br>His sire was wont to do forest-work in;<br>Blesseder he who nobly sunk "ohs"<br>And "ahs" while he tugged on his grandsire's trunk-hose;<br>What signified hats if they had no rims on,<br>Each slouching before and behind like the scallop,<br>And able to serve at sea for a shallop,<br>Loaded with lacquer and looped with crimson?<br>So that the deer now, to make a short rhyme on't,<br>What with our Venerers, Prickers and Verderers,<br>Might hope for real hunters at length and not murderers,<br>And oh the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now you must know that when the first dizziness<br>Of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots subsided,<br>The Duke put this question, "The Duke's part provided,<br>Had not the Duchess some share in the business?"<br>For out of the mouth of two or three witnesses<br>Did he establish all fit-or-unfitnesses:<br>And, after much laying of heads together,<br>Somebody's cap got a notable feather<br>By the announcement with proper unction<br>That he had discovered the lady's function;<br>Since ancient authors gave this tenet,<br>"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,<br>Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,<br>And with water to wash the hands of her liege<br>In a clean ewer with a fair toweling,<br>Let her preside at the disemboweling."<br>Now, my friend, if you had so little religion<br>As to catch a hawk, some falcon-lanner,<br>And thrust her broad wings like a banner<br>Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon;<br>And if day by day and week by week<br>You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes,<br>And clipped her wings, and tied her beak,<br>Would it cause you any great surprise<br>If, when you decided to give her an airing,<br>You found she needed a little preparing?<br>—I say, should you be such a curmudgeon,<br>If she clung to the perch, as to take it in dudgeon?<br>Yet when the Duke to his lady signified,<br>Just a day before, as he judged most dignified,<br>In what a pleasure she was to participate,—<br>And, instead of leaping wide in flashes,<br>Her eyes just lifted their long lashes,<br>As if pressed by fatigue even he could not dissipate,<br>And duly acknowledged the Duke's fore-thought,<br>But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,<br>Of the weight by day and the watch by night,<br>And much wrong now that used to be right,<br>So, thanking him, declined the hunting—<br>Was conduct ever more affronting?<br>With all the ceremony settled—<br>With the towel ready, and the sewer<br>Polishing up his oldest ewer,<br>And the jennet pitched upon, a piebald,<br>Black-barred, cream-coated and pink eye-balled—<br>No wonder if the Duke was nettled!<br>And when she persisted nevertheless,—<br>Well, I suppose here's the time to confess<br>That there ran half round our lady's chamber<br>A balcony none of the hardest to clamber;<br>And that Jacynth the tire-woman, ready in waiting,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Stayed in call outside, what need of relating?<br>And since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, a fervent<br>Adorer of Jacynth of course was your servant;<br>And if she had the habit to peep through the casement,<br>How could I keep at any vast distance?<br>And so, as I say, on the lady's persistence,<br>The Duke, dumb-stricken with amazement,<br>Stood for a while in a sultry smother,<br>And then, with a smile that partook of the awful,<br>Turned her over to his yellow mother<br>To learn what was held decorous and lawful;<br>And the mother smelt blood with a cat-like instinct,<br>As her cheek quick whitened thro' all its quince-tinct.<br>Oh, but the lady heard the whole truth at once!<br>What meant she?—Who was she?—Her duty and station,<br>The wisdom of age and the folly of youth, at once,<br>Its decent regard and its fitting relation—<br>In brief, my friend, set all the devils in hell free<br>And turn them out to carouse in a belfry<br>And treat the priests to a fifty-part canon,<br>And then you may guess how that tongue of hers ran on!<br>Well, somehow or other it ended at last<br>And, licking her whiskers, out she passed;<br>And after her,—making (he hoped) a face<br>Like Emperor Nero or Sultan Saladin,<br>Stalked the Duke's self with the austere grace<br>Of ancient hero or modern paladin,<br>From door to staircase—oh such a solemn<br>Unbending of the vertebral column!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">However, at sunrise our company mustered;<br>And here was the huntsman bidding unkennel,<br>And there 'neath his bonnet the pricker blustered,<br>With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel;<br>For the court-yard walls were filled with fog<br>You might have cut as an axe chops a log—<br>Like so much wool for colour and bulkiness;<br>And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness,<br>Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily<br>And a sinking at the lower abdomen<br>Begins the day with indifferent omen.<br>And lo, as he looked around uneasily,<br>The sun ploughed the fog up and drove it asunder<br>This way and that from the valley under;<br>And, looking through the court-yard arch,<br>Down in the valley, what should meet him<br>But a troop of Gipsies on their march?<br>No doubt with the annual gifts to greet him.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XIII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now, in your land, Gipsies reach you, only<br>After reaching all lands beside;<br>North they go, South they go, trooping or lonely<br>And still, as they travel far and wide,<br>Catch they and keep now a trace here, a trace there,<br>That puts you in mind of a place here, a place there.<br>But with us, I believe they rise out of the ground,<br>And nowhere else, I take it, are found<br>With the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned:<br>Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on<br>The very fruit they are meant to feed on.<br>For the earth-not a use to which they don't turn it,<br>The ore that grows in the mountain's womb,<br>Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb,<br>They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it—<br>Whether they weld you, for instance, a snaffle<br>With side-bars never a brute can baffle;<br>Or a lock that's a puzzle of wards within wards;<br>Or, if your colt's fore-foot inclines to curve inwards,<br>Horseshoes they hammer which turn on a swivel<br>And won't allow the hoof to shrivel.<br>Then they cast bells like the shell of the winkle<br>That keep a stout heart in the ram with their tinkle;<br>But the sand-they pinch and pound it like otters;<br>Commend me to Gipsy glass-makers and potters!<br>Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,<br>Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,<br>As if in pure water you dropped and let die<br>A bruised black-blooded mulberry;<br>And that other sort, their crowning pride,<br>With long white threads distinct inside,<br>Like the lake-flower's fibrous roots which dangle<br>Loose such a length and never tangle,<br>Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters,<br>And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters:<br>Such are the works they put their hand to,<br>The uses they turn and twist iron and sand to.<br>And these made the troop, which our Duke saw sally<br>Toward his castle from out of the valley,<br>Men and women, like new-hatched spiders,<br>Come out with the morning to greet our riders.<br>And up they wound till they reached the ditch,<br>Whereat all stopped save one, a witch<br>That I knew, as she hobbled from the group,<br>By her gait directly and her stoop,<br>I, whom Jacynth was used to importune<br>To let that same witch tell us our fortune.<br>The oldest Gipsy then above ground;<br>And, sure as the autumn season came round,<br>She paid us a visit for profit or pastime,<br>And every time, as she swore, for the last time.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And presently she was seen to sidle<br>Up to the Duke till she touched his bridle,<br>So that the horse of a sudden reared up<br>As under its nose the old witch peered up<br>With her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes<br>Of no use now but to gather brine,<br>And began a kind of level whine<br>Such as they used to sing to their viols<br>When their ditties they go grinding<br>Up and down with nobody minding<br>And then, as of old, at the end of the humming<br>Her usual presents were forthcoming<br>—A dog-whistle blowing the fiercest of trebles,<br>(Just a sea-shore stone holding a dozen fine pebbles)<br>Or a porcelain mouth-piece to screw on a pipe-end—<br>And so she awaited her annual stipend.<br>But this time, the Duke would scarcely vouchsafe<br>A word in reply; and in vain she felt<br>With twitching fingers at her belt<br>For the purse of sleek pine-martin pelt,<br>Ready to put what he gave in her pouch safe—<br>Till, either to quicken his apprehension,<br>Or possibly with an after-intention,<br>She was come, she said, to pay her duty<br>To the new Duchess, the youthful beauty.<br>No sooner had she named his lady,<br>Than a shine lit up the face so shady,<br>And its smirk returned with a novel meaning—<br>For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning;<br>If one gave her a taste of what life was and sorrow,<br>She, foolish today, would be wiser tomorrow;<br>And who so fit a teacher of trouble<br>As this sordid crone bent well-nigh double?<br>So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture,<br>(If such it was, for they grow so hirsute<br>That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit)<br>He was contrasting, 'twas plain from his gesture,<br>The life of the lady so flower-like and delicate<br>With the loathsome squalor of this helicat.<br>I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned<br>From out of the throng, and while I drew near<br>He told the crone-as I since have reckoned<br>By the way he bent and spoke into her ear<br>With circumspection and mystery—<br>The main of the lady's history,<br>Her frowardness and ingratitude:<br>And for all the crone's submissive attitude<br>I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening,<br>And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening<br>As though she engaged with hearty goodwill<br>Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil,<br>And promised the lady a thorough frightening.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And so, just giving her a glimpse<br>Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps<br>The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw,<br>He bade me take the Gipsy mother<br>And set her telling some story or other<br>Of hill or dale, oak-wood or fernshaw,<br>To wile away a weary hour<br>For the lady left alone in her bower,<br>Whose mind and body craved exertion<br>And yet shrank from all better diversion.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XIV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then clapping heel to his horse, the mere curveter,<br>Out rode the Duke, and after his hollo<br>Horses and hounds swept, huntsman and servitor,<br>And back I turned and bade the crone follow.<br>And what makes me confident what's to be told you<br>Had all along been of this crone's devising,<br>Is, that, on looking round sharply, behold you,<br>There was a novelty quick as surprising:<br>For first, she had shot up a full head in stature,<br>And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered,<br>As if age had foregone its usurpature,<br>And the ignoble mien was wholly altered,<br>And the face looked quite of another nature,<br>And the change reached too, whatever the change meant,<br>Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak's arrangement:<br>For where its tatters hung loose like sedges,<br>Gold coins were glittering on the edges,<br>Like the band-roll strung with tomans<br>Which proves the veil a Persian woman's:<br>And under her brow, like a snail's horns newly<br>Come out as after the rain he paces,<br>Two unmistakeable eye-points duly<br>Live and aware looked out of their places.<br>So, we went and found Jacynth at the entry<br>Of the lady's chamber standing sentry;<br>I told the command and produced my companion,<br>And Jacynth rejoiced to admit any one,<br>For since last night, by the same token,<br>Not a single word had the lady spoken:<br>They went in both to the presence together,<br>While I in the balcony watched the weather.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now, what took place at the very first of all,<br>I cannot tell, as I never could learn it:<br>Jacynth constantly wished a curse to fall<br>On that little head of hers and burn it<br>If she knew how she came to drop so soundly<br>Asleep of a sudden and there continue<br>The whole time sleeping as profoundly<br>As one of the boars my father would pin you<br>'Twixt the eyes where life holds garrison,<br>—Jacynth forgive me the comparison!<br>But where I begin my own narration<br>Is a little after I took my station<br>To breathe the fresh air from the balcony,<br>And, having in those days a falcon eye,<br>To follow the hunt thro' the open country,<br>From where the bushes thinlier crested<br>The hillocks, to a plain where's not one tree.<br>When, in a moment, my ear was arrested<br>By—was it singing, or was it saying,<br>Or a strange musical instrument playing<br>In the chamber?—and to be certain<br>I pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain,<br>And there lay Jacynth asleep,<br>Yet as if a watch she tried to keep,<br>In a rosy sleep along the floor<br>With her head against the door;<br>While in the midst, on the seat of state,<br>Was a queen-the Gipsy woman late,<br>With head and face downbent<br>On the lady's head and face intent:<br>For, coiled at her feet like a child at ease,<br>The lady sat between her knees<br>And o'er them the lady's clasped hands met,<br>And on those hands her chin was set,<br>And her upturned face met the face of the crone<br>Wherein the eyes had grown and grown<br>As if she could double and quadruple<br>At pleasure the play of either pupil<br>—Very like, by her hands' slow fanning,<br>As up and down like a gor-crow's flappers<br>They moved to measure, or bell-clappers.<br>I said, "Is it blessing, is it banning,<br>Do they applaud you or burlesque you—<br>Those hands and fingers with no flesh on?"<br>But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue,<br>At once I was stopped by the lady's expression:<br>For it was life her eyes were drinking<br>From the crone's wide pair above unwinking,<br>—Life's pure fire received without shrinking,<br>Into the heart and breast whose heaving<br>Told you no single drop they were leaving,<br>—Life, that filling her, passed redundant<br>Into her very hair, back swerving<br>Over each shoulder, loose and abundant,<br>As her head thrown back showed the white throat curving;<br>And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,<br>Moving to the mystic measure,<br>Bounding as the bosom bounded.<br>I stopped short, more and more confounded,<br>As still her cheeks burned and eyes glistened,<br>As she listened and she listened:<br>When all at once a hand detained me,<br>The selfsame contagion gained me,<br>And I kept time to the wondrous chime,<br>Making out words and prose and rhyme,<br>Till it seemed that the music furled<br>Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped<br>From under the words it first had propped,<br>And left them midway in the world:<br>Word took word as hand takes hand<br>I could hear at last, and understand,<br>And when I held the unbroken thread,<br>The Gipsy said:<br>"And so at last we find my tribe.<br>And so I set thee in the midst,<br>And to one and all of them describe<br>What thou saidst and what thou didst,<br>Our long and terrible journey through,<br>And all thou art ready to say and do<br>In the trials that remain:<br>I trace them the vein and the other vein<br>That meet on thy brow and part again,<br>Making our rapid mystic mark;<br>And I bid my people prove and probe<br>Each eye's profound and glorious globe<br>Till they detect the kindred spark<br>In those depths so dear and dark,<br>Like the spots that snap and burst and flee,<br>Circling over the midnight sea.<br>And on that round young cheek of thine<br>I make them recognize the tinge,<br>As when of the costly scarlet wine<br>They drip so much as will impinge<br>And spread in a thinnest scale afloat<br>One thick gold drop from the olive's coat<br>Over a silver plate whose sheen<br>Still thro' the mixture shall be seen.<br>For so I prove thee, to one and all,<br>Fit, when my people ope their breast,<br>To see the sign, and hear the call,<br>And take the vow, and stand the test<br>Which adds one more child to the rest—<br>When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,<br>And the world is left outside.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For there is probation to decree,<br>And many and long must the trials be<br>Thou shalt victoriously endure,<br>If that brow is true and those eyes are sure;<br>Like a jewel-finder's fierce assay<br>Of the prize he dug from its mountain tomb—<br>Let once the vindicating ray<br>Leap out amid the anxious gloom,<br>And steel and fire have done their part<br>And the prize falls on its finder's heart;<br>So, trial after trial past,<br>Wilt thou fall at the very last<br>Breathless, half in trance<br>With the thrill of the great deliverance,<br>Into our arms for evermore;<br>And thou shalt know, those arms once curled<br>About thee, what we knew before,<br>How love is the only good in the world.<br>Henceforth be loved as heart can love,<br>Or brain devise, or hand approve!<br>Stand up, look below,<br>It is our life at thy feet we throw<br>To step with into light and joy;<br>Not a power of life but we employ<br>To satisfy thy nature's want;<br>Art thou the tree that props the plant,<br>Or the climbing plant that seeks the tree—<br>Canst thou help us, must we help thee?<br>If any two creatures grew into one,<br>They would do more than the world has done:<br>Though each apart were never so weak,<br>Ye vainly through the world should seek<br>For the knowledge and the might<br>Which in such union grew their right:<br>So, to approach at least that end,<br>And blend,—as much as may be, blend<br>Thee with us or us with thee—<br>As climbing plant or propping tree,<br>Shall some one deck thee, over and down,<br>Up and about, with blossoms and leaves?<br>Fix his heart's fruit for thy garland-crown,<br>Cling with his soul as the gourd-vine cleaves,<br>Die on thy boughs and disappear<br>While not a leaf of thine is sere?<br>Or is the other fate in store,<br>And art thou fitted to adore,<br>To give thy wondrous self away,<br>And take a stronger nature's sway?<br>I foresee and could foretell<br>Thy future portion, sure and well:<br>But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,<br>Let them say what thou shalt do!<br>Only be sure thy daily life,<br>In its peace or in its strife,<br>Never shall be unobserved;<br>We pursue thy whole career,<br>And hope for it, or doubt, or fear—<br>Lo, hast thou kept thy path or swerved,<br>We are beside thee in all thy ways,<br>With our blame, with our praise,<br>Our shame to feel, our pride to show,<br>Glad, angry—but indifferent, no!<br>Whether it be thy lot to go,<br>For the good of us all, where the haters meet<br>In the crowded city's horrible street;<br>Or thou step alone through the morass<br>Where never sound yet was<br>Save the dry quick clap of the stork's bill,<br>For the air is still, and the water still,<br>When the blue breast of the dipping coot<br>Dives under, and all is mute.<br>So, at the last shall come old age,<br>Decrepit as befits that stage;<br>How else wouldst thou retire apart<br>With the hoarded memories of thy heart,<br>And gather all to the very least<br>Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,<br>Let fall through eagerness to find<br>The crowning dainties yet behind?<br>Ponder on the entire past<br>Laid together thus at last,<br>When the twilight helps to fuse<br>The first fresh with the faded hues,<br>And the outline of the whole,<br>As round eve's shades their framework roll,<br>Grandly fronts for once thy soul.<br>And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam<br>Of yet another morning breaks,<br>And like the hand which ends a dream,<br>Death, with the might of his sunbeam,<br>Touches the flesh and the soul awakes,<br>Then—"<br>Ay, then indeed something would happen!<br>But what? For here her voice changed like a bird's;<br>There grew more of the music and less of the words;<br>Had Jacynth only been by me to clap pen<br>To paper and put you down every syllable<br>With those clever clerkly fingers,<br>All I've forgotten as well as what lingers<br>In this old brain of mine that's but ill able<br>To give you even this poor version<br>Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering<br>—More fault of those who had the hammering<br>Of prosody into me and syntax<br>And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But to return from this excursion—<br>Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest,<br>The peace most deep and the charm completest,<br>There came, shall I say, a snap—<br>And the charm vanished!<br>And my sense returned, so strangely banished,<br>And, starting as from a nap,<br>I knew the crone was bewitching my lady,<br>With Jacynth asleep; and but one spring made I<br>Down from the casement, round to the portal,<br>Another minute and I had entered—<br>When the door opened, and more than mortal<br>Stood, with a face where to my mind centred<br>All beauties I ever saw or shall see,<br>The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.<br>She was so different, happy and beautiful,<br>I felt at once that all was best,<br>And that I had nothing to do, for the rest<br>But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful.<br>Not that, in fact, there was any commanding;<br>I saw the glory of her eye,<br>And the brow's height and the breast's expanding,<br>And I was hers to live or to die.<br>As for finding what she wanted,<br>You know God Almighty granted<br>Such little signs should serve wild creatures<br>To tell one another all their desires,<br>So that each knows what his friend requires,<br>And does its bidding without teachers.<br>I preceded her; the crone<br>Followed silent and alone;<br>I spoke to her, but she merely jabbered<br>In the old style; both her eyes had slunk<br>Back to their pits; her stature shrunk;<br>In short, the soul in its body sunk<br>Like a blade sent home to its scabbard.<br>We descended, I preceding;<br>Crossed the court with nobody heeding;<br>All the world was at the chase,<br>The courtyard like a desert-place,<br>The stable emptied of its small fry;<br>I saddled myself the very palfrey<br>I remember patting while it carried her,<br>The day she arrived and the Duke married her.<br>And, do you know, though it's easy deceiving<br>Oneself in such matters, I can't help believing<br>The lady had not forgotten it either,<br>And knew the poor devil so much beneath her<br>Would have been only too glad for her service<br>To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise,<br>But, unable to pay proper duty where owing<br>Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it:<br>For though the moment I began setting<br>His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting,<br>(Not that I meant to be obtrusive)<br>She stopped me, while his rug was shifting,<br>By a single rapid finger's lifting,<br>And, with a gesture kind but conclusive,<br>And a little shake of the head, refused me—<br>I say, although she never used me,<br>Yet when she was mounted, the Gipsy behind her,<br>And I ventured to remind her<br>I suppose with a voice of less steadiness<br>Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me,<br>—Something to the effect that I was in readiness<br>Whenever God should please she needed me—<br>Then, do you know, her face looked down on me<br>With a look that placed a crown on me,<br>And she felt in her bosom—mark, her bosom—<br>And, as a flower-tree drops its blossom,<br>Dropped me . . . ah, had it been a purse<br>Of silver, my friend, or gold that's worse,<br>Why, you see, as soon as I found myself<br>So understood,—that a true heart so may gain<br>Such a reward,—I should have gone home again,<br>Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself!<br>It was a little plait of hair<br>Such as friends in a convent make<br>To wear, each for the other's sake—<br>This, see, which at my breast I wear,<br>Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment),<br>And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.<br>And then-and then—to cut short—this is idle,<br>These are feelings it is not good to foster—<br>I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,<br>And the palfrey bounded—and so we lost her.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XVI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When the liquor's out why clink the cannikin?<br>I did think to describe you the panic in<br>The redoubtable breast of our master the mannikin,<br>And what was the pitch of his mother's yellowness,<br>How she turned as a shark to snap the spare-rib<br>Clean off, sailors say, from a pearl-diving Carib,<br>When she heard, what she called the flight of the feloness<br>—But it seems such child's play,<br>What they said and did with the lady away!<br>And to dance on, when we've lost the music,<br>Always made me—and no doubt makes you—sick.<br>Nay, to my mind, the world's face looked so stern<br>As that sweet form disappeared through the postern,<br>She that kept it in constant good humour,<br>It ought to have stopped; there seemed nothing to do more.<br>But the world thought otherwise and went on,<br>And my head's one that its spite was spent on:<br>Thirty years are fled since that morning,<br>And with them all my head's adorning.<br>Nor did the old Duchess die outright,<br>As you expect, of suppressed spite,<br>The natural end of every adder<br>Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder:<br>But she and her son agreed, I take it,<br>That no one should touch on the story to wake it,<br>For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery,<br>So, they made no search and small inquiry—<br>And when fresh Gipsies have paid us a visit, I've<br>Notice the couple were never inquisitive,<br>But told them they're folks the Duke don't want here,<br>And bade them make haste and cross the frontier.<br>Brief, the Duchess was gone and the Duke was glad of it,<br>And the old one was in the young one's stead,<br>And took, in her place, the household's head,<br>And a blessed time the household had of it!<br>And were I not, as a man may say, cautious<br>How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous,<br>I could favour you with sundry touches<br>Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess<br>Heightened the mellowness of her cheek's yellowness<br>(To get on faster) until at last her<br>Cheek grew to be one master-plaster<br>Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse:<br>In short, she grew from scalp to udder<br>Just the object to make you shudder.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>XVII</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You're my friend—<br>What a thing friendship is, world without end!<br>How it gives the heart and soul a stir-up<br>As if somebody broached you a glorious runlet,<br>And poured out, all lovelily, sparklingly, sunlit,<br>Our green Moldavia, the streaky syrup,<br>Cotnar as old as the time of the Druids—<br>Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids;<br>Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs,<br>Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts<br>Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees<br>Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease.<br>I have seen my little lady once more,<br>Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it,<br>For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before;<br>I always wanted to make a clean breast of it:<br>And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went trickle,<br>Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets,<br>Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle,<br>And genially floats me about the giblets.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I'll tell you what I intend to do:<br>I must see this fellow his sad life through—<br>He is our Duke, after all,<br>And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall.<br>My father was born here, and I inherit<br>His fame, a chain he bound his son with;<br>Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it,<br>But there's no mine to blow up and get done with:<br>So, I must stay till the end of the chapter.<br>For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter,<br>Be it a thing to be glad on or sorry on,<br>Some day or other, his head in a morion<br>And breast in a hauberk, his heels he'll kick up,<br>Slain by an onslaught fierce of hiccup.<br>And then, when red doth the sword of our Duke rust,<br>And its leathern sheath lie o'ergrown with a blue crust,<br>Then I shall scrape together my earnings;<br>For, you see, in the churchyard Jacynth reposes,<br>And our children all went the way of the roses:<br>It's a long lane that knows no turnings.<br>One needs but little tackle to travel in;<br>So, just one stout cloak shall I indue:<br>And for a staff, what beats the javelin<br>With which his boars my father pinned you?<br>And then, for a purpose you shall hear presently,<br>Taking some Cotnar, a tight plump skinful,<br>I shall go journeying, who but I, pleasantly!<br>Sorrow is vain and despondency sinful.<br>What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;<br>Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:<br>When we mind labour, then only, we're too old—<br>What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?<br>And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees,<br>(Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil)<br>I hope to get safely out of the turmoil<br>And arrive one day at the land of the Gipsies,<br>And find my lady, or hear the last news of her<br>From some old thief and son of Lucifer,<br>His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop,<br>Sunburned all over like an AEthiop.<br>And when my Cotnar begins to operate<br>And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate,<br>And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent,<br>I shall drop in with—as if by accident—<br>"You never knew, then, how it all ended,<br>What fortune good or bad attended<br>The little lady your Queen befriended?"<br>—And when that's told me, what's remaining?<br>This world's too hard for my explaining.<br>The same wise judge of matters equine<br>Who still preferred some slim four-year-old<br>To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold<br>And, for strong Cotnar, drank French weak wine,<br>He also must be such a lady's scorner!<br>Smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau:<br>Now up, now down, the world's one see-saw.<br>—So, I shall find out some snug corner<br>Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight,<br>Turn myself round and bid the world good night;<br>And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet blowing<br>Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen)<br>To a world where will be no further throwing<br>Pearls before swine that can't value them. Amen!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Robert+Browning">Robert Browning</a> from <i>Dramatic Romances and Lyrics</i><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116225" data-title="The Flight of the Duchess de Robert Browning" data-description="I/You're my friend:/I was the man the Duke spoke to;/I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too;/So here's the tale from beginning to end,/My friend!//II/Ours is a great wild country:/If you climb to our castle's top,/I don't see where your ey..."></div> </div> </div>

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