Alone in the midst of the throng,
'Mid the lights and the splendor alone,
Her eyes, dropped for shame of her wrong,
She lifts not to eyes she has known:
Around her the whirl and the stir
Of the light-footing dancers she hears;
None seeks her; no whisper for her
Of the gracious words filling her ears.
The fair boy that runs to her knees,
With a shout for his mother, and kiss
For the tear-drop that welling he sees
To her eyes from her sorrow's abyss,--
Though he blooms like a rose, the fair boy,
No praise of his beauty is heard;
None with him stays to jest or to toy,
None to her gives a smile or a word.
If, unknowing, one ask who may be
This woman, that, as in disgrace,
O'er the curls of the boy at her knee
Bows her beautiful, joyless face,
A hundred tongues answer in scorn,
A hundred lips teach him to know--
“Wife of one of our tyrants, forsworn
To her friends in her truth to their foe.”
At the play, in the streets, in the lanes,
At the fane of the merciful God,
'Midst a people in prison and chains,
Spy-haunted, at home and abroad--
Steals through all like the hiss of a snake
Hate, by terror itself unsuppressed:
“Cursed be the Italian could take
The Austrian foe to her breast!”
Alone--but the absence she mourned
As widowhood mourneth, is past:
Her heart leaps for her husband returned
From his garrison far-off at last?
Ah, no! For this woman forlorn
Love is dead, she has felt him depart:
With far other thoughts she is torn,
Far other the grief at her heart.
When the shame that has darkened her days
Fantasmal at night fills the gloom,
When her soul, lost in wildering ways,
Flies the past, and the terror to come--
When she leaps from her slumbers to hark,
As if for her little one's call,
It is then to the pitiless dark
That her woe-burdened soul utters all:
“Woe is me! It was God's righteous hand
My brain with its madness that smote:
At the alien's flattering command
The land of my birth I forgot!
I, the girl who was loved and adored,
Feasted, honored in every place,
Now what am I? The apostate abhorred,
Who was false to her home and her race!
“I turned from the common disaster;
My brothers oppressed I denied;
I smiled on their insolent master;
I came and sat down by his side.
Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought;
Thou hast wrought it--it clingeth to thee,
And for all that thou sufferest, naught
From its meshes thy spirit can free.
“Oh, the scorn I have tasted! They know not,
Who pour it on me, how it burns;
How it galls the meek spirit, whose woe not
Their hating with hating returns!
Fool! I merit it: I have not holden
My feet from their paths! Mine the blame:
I have sought in their eyes to embolden
This visage devoted to shame!
“Rejected and followed with scorn,
My child, like a child born of sin,
In the land where my darling was born,
He lives exiled! A refuge to win
From their hatred, he runs in dismay
To my arms. But the day may yet be
When my son shall the insult repay,
I have nurtured him in, unto me!
“If it chances that ever the slave
Snaps the shackles that bind him, and leaps
Into life in the heart of the brave
The sense of the might that now sleeps--
To which people, which side shall I cleave?
Which fate shall I curse with my own?
To which banner pray Heaven to give
The triumph? Which desire o'erthrown?
“Italian, and sister, and wife,
And mother, unfriended, alone,
Outcast, I wander through life,
Over shard and bramble and stone!
Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought;
Thou hast wrought it--it clingeth to thee,
And for all that thou sufferest, naught
From its meshes thy spirit shall free!”