# Potiphar's Wife and Other Poems/To a Pair of Egyptian Slippers

TO A PAIR OF EGYPTIAN SLIPPERS
Tiny slippers of gold and green, Tied with a mouldering golden cord! What pretty feet they must have been When Cæsar 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 featly 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 laughed, 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 stitched, Should Home and the Pharaohs outlive—and you Be gone, like a dream, from the world you bewitched!
Not that we mourn you! 'Twere too absurd! You have been such a very 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 vaporzed hence To this odor—so subtle and delicate— Of myrrh, and cassia, and frankincense.
​Of course they embalmed 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 tripped 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 tease you with history, Nor vex your heart for the men which 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 smashed 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, maybe, 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 vanished, forgotten—No! not quite that! I catch some gleam of the grace you wore When you finished 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-fashioned 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 Slipper"—to see it all plain!