| |
| TINY slippers of gold and green, | |
| Tied with a mouldering golden cord! | |
| What pretty feet they must have been | |
| When Caesar Augustus was Egypt’s lord! | |
| Somebody graceful and fair you were! | 5 |
| Not many girls could dance in these! | |
| When did your shoemaker make you, dear, | |
| Such a nice pair of Egyptian ‘threes’? | |
| |
| Where were you measured? In Saïs, or On, | |
| Memphis, or Thebes, or Pelusium? | 10 |
| Fitting them neatly your brown toes upon, | |
| Lacing them deftly with finger and thumb, | |
| I seem to see you!—so long ago, | |
| Twenty-one centuries, less or more! | |
| And here are your sandals: yet none of us know | 15 |
| What name, or fortune, or face you bore. | |
| |
| Your lips would have laugh’d, with a rosy scorn, | |
| If the merchant, or slave-girl, had mockingly said, | |
| ‘The feet will pass, but the shoes they have worn | |
| Two thousand years onward Time’s road shall tread, | 20 |
| And still be footgear as good as new!’ | |
| To think that calf-skin, gilded and stitch’d, | |
| Should Rome and the Pharaohs outlive—and you | |
| Be gone, like a dream, from the world you bewitch’d! | |
| |
| Not that we mourn you! ’Twere too absurd! | 25 |
| You have been such a long while away! | |
| Your dry spiced dust would not value one word | |
| Of the soft regrets that my verse could say. | |
| Sorrow and Pleasure, and Love and Hate, | |
| If you ever felt them, have vaporized hence | 30 |
| To this odour—so subtle and delicate— | |
| Of myrrh, and cassia, and frankincense. | |
| |
| Of course they embalm’d you! Yet not so sweet | |
| Were aloes and nard, as the youthful glow | |
| Which Amenti stole when the small dark feet | 35 |
| Wearied of treading our world below. | |
| Look! it was flood-time in valley of Nile, | |
| Or a very wet day in the Delta, dear! | |
| When your slippers tripp’d lightly their latest mile— | |
| The mud on the soles renders that fact clear. | 40 |
| |
| You knew Cleopatra, no doubt! You saw | |
| Antony’s galleys from Actium come. | |
| But there! if questions could answers draw | |
| From lips so many a long age dumb, | |
| I would not teaze you with history, | 45 |
| Nor vex your heart for the men that were; | |
| The one point to learn that would fascinate me | |
| Is, where and what are you to-day, my dear! | |
| |
| You died, believing in Horus and Pasht, | |
| Isis, Osiris, and priestly lore; | 50 |
| And found, of course, such theories smash’d | |
| By actual fact on the heavenly shore. | |
| What next did you do? Did you transmigrate? | |
| Have we seen you since, all modern and fresh? | |
| Your charming soul—so I calculate— | 55 |
| Mislaid its mummy, and sought new flesh. | |
| |
| Were you she whom I met at dinner last week, | |
| With eyes and hair of the Ptolemy black, | |
| Who still of this find in the Fayoum would speak, | |
| And to Pharaohs and scarabs still carry us back? | 60 |
| A scent of lotus about her hung, | |
| And she had such a far-away wistful air | |
| As of somebody born when the Earth was young; | |
| And she wore of gilt slippers a lovely pair. | |
| |
| Perchance you were married? These might have been | 65 |
| Part of your trousseau—the wedding shoes; | |
| And you laid them aside with the garments green, | |
| And painted clay Gods which a bride would use; | |
| And, may be, to-day, by Nile’s bright waters | |
| Damsels of Egypt in gowns of blue— | 70 |
| Great-great-great—very great—grand-daughters | |
| Owe their shapely insteps to you! | |
| |
| But vainly I beat at the bars of the Past, | |
| Little green slippers with golden strings! | |
| For all you can tell is that leather will last | 75 |
| When loves, and delightings, and beautiful things | |
| Have vanish’d, forgotten—No! not quite that! | |
| I catch some gleam of the grace you wore | |
| When you finish’d with Life’s daily pit-a-pat, | |
| And left your shoes at Death’s bedroom door. | 80 |
| |
| You were born in the Egypt which did not doubt; | |
| You were never sad with our new-fashion’d sorrows: | |
| You were sure, when your play-days on Earth ran out, | |
| Of play-times to come, as we of our morrows! | |
| Oh, wise little Maid of the Delta! I lay | 85 |
| Your shoes in your mummy-chest back again, | |
| And wish that one game we might merrily play | |
| At ‘Hunt the Slippers’—to see it all plain. | |
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