Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.

To a Pair of Egyptian Slippers

Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904)

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!

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?

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

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,

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!

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

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

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.

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,

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;

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—

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?

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

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—

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

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.

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

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.