Josefa, when you sing, With clapping hands, the sorrows of your Spain, And all the bright-shawled ring Laugh and clap hands again, I think how all the sorrows were in vain. The footlights flicker and spire In tongues of flame before your tiny feet, My warm-eyed gipsy, higher, And in your eyes they meet More than their light, more than their golden heat. You sing of Spain, and all Clap hands for Spain and you, and for the song; One dances, and the hall Rings like a beaten gong With louder-handed clamours of the throng. Spain, that with dancing mirth Tripped lightly to the precipice, and fell Until she felt the earth, Suddenly, and knew well That to have fallen through dreams is to touch hell; Spain, brilliantly arrayed, Decked for disaster, on disaster hurled, Here, as in masquerade, Mimes, to amuse the world, Her ruin, a dancer rouged and draped and curled. Mother of chivalry, Mother of many sorrows borne for God, Spain of the saints, is she A slave beneath the rod, A merry slave, and in her own abode? She, who once found, has lost A world beyond the waters, and she stands Paying the priceless cost, Lightly, with lives for lands, Flowers in her hair, castanets in her hands. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO JOHN BROWN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON LOHENGRIN; PROEM by EMMA LAZARUS PARTING AT MORNING by ROBERT BROWNING THOSE WHO LOVE by SARA TEASDALE CASEY AT THE BAT (1) by ERNEST LAWRENCE THAYER AT LORD'S [CRICKET GROUND] by FRANCIS THOMPSON |