Orientalism. The symbolist critic Arthur Symons could write in ‘In Praise
of Gypsies’ that ‘The Gypsies are nearer to the animals than any race
known to us in Europe. They have the lawlessness, the abandonment, the
natural physical grace in form and gesture, of animals; only a stealthy and
wary something in their eyes makes them human.’^62 So also Thomas’s
poem, in which ‘not even the kneeling ox had eyes like the Romany’, and
for comparison, Ralph Hodgson’s ‘The Gipsy Girl’, published inGeorgian
Poetry 1916 – 1917 :
She fawned and whined ‘Sweet gentleman,
A penny for three tries!’- But oh, the den of wild things in
The darkness of her eyes!
And the uneven balance between gift and gratitude which the poem
debates, ‘I gave it... and I paid nothing then’, was held by gypsy-lovers
to be part of the gypsies’ disdain for quantifiable monetary analysis of
goods and services. ‘The Gypsy will have no possessions, knowing, as none
of us know, that every possession is a fetter’, claimed Symons.^63 When
they steal, declared another gypsyologist, it is not for gain, but ‘as a child
... taking what he needs when he finds it lying unprotected before him’.^64
But Thomas equally knew that such sentiments, ‘wistful or fancifully
envious admiration’ for gypsies, were ‘akin to the sentiment for childhood
and the golden age’, for ‘unromanizedGermani, or animals who do not
fret about their souls’, desires only felt by the Wagnerian, Whitmanian
middle classes who ‘over-eat and over-dress in comfort all the days of their
lives’.^65 Borrow, whom he was hoping to defend from this charge, is more
often ‘almost on an equality’ with the gypsies. And it is this doubtful
equality that underlies the large amount of self-questioning in the poem,
starting with the notebook from which he reminded himself of the
original incident: ‘All begging. One boy and girl I ran away from.’^66 In
the poem that resulted, Thomas is not content to move from the human
to the animal and remain there admiringly, but must probe that fear,
trying to work out what was really going on in their exchange. ‘I should
have given more’, he considers, but she had gone ‘before I could translate
to its proper coin / Gratitude for her grace’. What kind of gratitude pays
for ‘grace’, though, an insouciance of speech and attitude that is lucky and
free? This doubt underlies the alternate readings of the conversation with
the gypsy, where we can hear the possibility that Derek Attridge has noted
is common to English hexameter, that of alternating between four and six
actual stresses.^67 If four, then the tone is expansive:
96 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism