Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, GIPSIES AT NIGHT, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

GIPSIES AT NIGHT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: With brown arms wreathed about the fire
Last Line: Whom tears of things can touch no more?
Subject(s): Gypsies; Gipsies


With brown arms wreathed about the fire
Low crouch the wanderers circlewise;
Wild as regret or as desire
Their voices and deep liquid eyes;

Wild as the goings of the wind
Their tresses and their fluttering weeds,
And wild their talk of some unkind
Mishap and of poor daily needs.

Behind a cart-wheel of their show
I hide as best I can to mark
This strange small arabesque aglow
Against the autumnal northern dark.

Quick! I am seen! They hush their speech,
And then with stealthy change resume
Discourse beyond my mental reach
In Romany that sounds like doom.

A melancholy girl repines,
While her wild eyes flash out in scorn;
A sybil with waved hand defines:
A lean man blurts a curse forlorn.

Oh Gipsies, wherefore am I kept
From your confabulation strange?
Have I in anything o'erstepped
The limits of the Trackless Range?

Have I not also wandered far
And known unrests and many dearths,
Speaking the language of some star
That shines not over happier births?

In Fate's inexorable mesh
I struggle, too, for no known cause:
Sharply as hunger of the flesh
The Famine of the Spirit gnaws.

Are we not poets both, that fleet
Across the wild of Time, aloof,
Too scarred and with too tameless feet
To win below the social roof,

And rest among pale mortal men,
And unrepiningly to snore
Like any honest citizen,
Whom tears of things can touch no more?





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net