Six 14-Line Poems

II.

PEACE to the odalisque, whose morning glory

Is vanishing, to live alone in story;

Firm in her place, a dull-robed figure stands,

With wistful eyes, and earnest, grappling hands:

The working-woman, she whose soul and brain—

Her tardy right—are bought with honest pain.

Oh woman! sacrifice may still be thine—

More fruitful than the souls ye did resign

To sated masters; from your lives, so real,

Will shape itself a pure and high ideal,

That ye will seek with sad, wide-open eyes,

Till, finding nowhere, baffled love shall rise

To higher planes, where passion may look pale,

But charity's white light shall never fail.