EL CLAVEL1.
Reading edition
EL CLAVEL1.
The carnation is the flower of predilection of the Andalusian peasant. His cottage does not seem like home without its scent; nor is the maiden’s toilet complete without one of its glorious blossoms placed behind her ear, in the ebon setting of her massive hair-braids: it is the token of gladness in their festivals; of love, where coyly offered with a trembling hand. The people sing of its perfections and its meaning in a thousand little ditties.
Among all the trees of the wood
The laurel bears questionless sway.
What maid can compete with my Anna?
They always speak of it, thus, as only next in order to female beauty, and the amorous swain is continually raising the comparison.
To January’s biting frost
No carnation trusts its charms,
The tints that Heav’n thy cheeks has given,
he sings; or perhaps,—
My carnation was raising a plaint,
I ask’d it to tell me its grief,
And it said that thy lips were so fair,
The one his fair has given him he declares binds him to her for ever.
The carnation which thou gav’st me,
On holy Thursday last,
Was no flower, but a fetter
The one she nurtures he watches as a token of all that is dearest and most beautiful in her.
My maid has a fav’rite carnation
Which she watches both early and late;
I give it a kiss on its petals,
And she in her turn guards her charge with a jealous eye.
A ruddy carnation have I,
But I keep it secure from the cold,
And I shade off the gaze of the sun,
“Ah!” cried the handsome carnation from the depths of its broken olla, “why should it not be my lot to adorn the head of this lovely creature, instead of being abandoned to the care of a penniless peasant?”
The maja smiled, and passed round the garden two or three times, to see if the carnation persisted in his idea. Every time her black veil caught, as she passed, in the sharp edge of the broken pipkin, the carnation wafted a soft sigh,—
“Ah, why was I not born to adorn that shining hair?”
The maja deferred no longer to fulfil his wish: throwing the bunch of showy flowers on to the ground, she plucked the carnation and plaited it into her hair.
Right proud was the carnation to find himself thus grandly enthroned; far too proud to have a thought of compassion for the other flowers cast away for his sake; too triumphant even to smart under the puncture of the hair-pin which fixed him on the maja’s head. Many a scornful glance he cast at the broken olla which had been his nursery, and the cot of the lowly child who had nurtured him.
Instead of blooming on his lordly stalk as at the first, the pride and pet of the peasant maid, he was soon trampled to atoms by a drove of pigs, passing on their way to market!