EASTER DANCE AT MEGARA

Green lizards flash along the walls Curd-white against the fire-blue bay; The pepper-trees’ fern branches sway Their delicate, hot, scarlet balls. The linkèd maidens wreathe the square, Blazing with festal coinage, hung On brown necks; yellow kerchiefs, flung O’er dusky, long, twin braids of hair. The Attic maids, with Attic mirth Subdued and shy, from hill and plain, On Easter holiday, at birth Of spring, weave altar-pacèd chain. And sing a song, to shepherd flute, Its shifting, three-toned lilt is cold, Only—it is so very old, The wonder is it is not mute. But so, they say, did maidens dance In dim Eleusis, near the shrine. And that is why these dark eyes shine With classic-cultured ignorance. And that is why, from near and far, Greek peasants come with stately pride, They know that Past from which they glide Into the dance at Megara!

In his long smock, and farmer’s cotton cap, Demetri dances. The old crones smile, the little children clap, The young girls’ glances Follow him, tall and grave, and deep of eye, Marvelling at him, yet aloof and shy; His fellow-dancers jostle roughly by With rude askances. The piper plays his reediest, shrillest tune, And at his leisure Demetri, as though pacing in a rune, Treads out a measure. The elders laugh: “Dance there, fantastic fellow! Tread down the grapes, while harvest moon is mellow, Give thy feet wings, fly o’er the sunset billow At thy good pleasure!” The little glasses of brown resin-wine Are quaffed; beads slipping Through the Greek fingers, slender, brown, and fine, Accent his skipping. They nudge, to see his hand curve on his shoulder, They marvel as his dark eyes burn and smoulder, And note his step less vague, his bearing bolder, And go on sipping. Around him dance the peasants, pacing slow With rhythmic swinging, But in and out he threads their simple show ’Midst childish singing. Reels past old bearded Greeks, their grave tales weaving, And fierce Wallachians come for Easter thieving; Albanian women with bold bosoms heaving To children clinging. Spell-bound, all watch him reel, and swerve, and bend; His dizzy spinning Dazzles their eyes. Word goes from friend to friend: “He is beginning!” For now with somber eyes, unveiled and burning, From peasant dance they see Demetri turning To an old trance of rapturous discerning— Loud plaudits winning. The sun shines paler on the kerchief’s gold, The church-bell’s tolling; The sea grows purple, and the distance cold, With dark waves rolling. The long lines break, the black-haired maidens wrangle; With exclamation all the dusty tangle Comes to a halt, ’mid glint of peasant spangle And soft song trolling. But tall Demetri lost in dreaming pace In solemn swaying, Keeps on alone, with tense and mystic face As he were praying. With hand upraised, as holding the caduceus, He looks away to old far-off Eleusis, Devising Dionysiac curves and nooses, Old Laws obeying. Why, in his face that mystic peering gaze Like a faun, waiting? Why does he pace his lonely, occult ways His eyes dilating? “Demetri!” “Mitchu!” tease the girls. Their screaming He does not hear, lost in far other seeming, In strange dance-spell, in old blood-tutored dreaming, Old rhythms creating.