The street is full of drums and shuffle of slow moving feet. Above the roofs in the shaking towers the bells yawn.

 The street is full of drums and shuffle of slow moving feet. The flanks of the houses glow with the warm glow of candles, and above the upturned faces, crowned, robed in a cone-shaped robe of vast dark folds glittering with gold, swaying on the necks of men, swaying with the strong throb of drums, haltingly she advances.

 What manner of woman are you, borne in triumph on the necks of men, you who look bitterly at the dead man on your knees, while your foot in an embroidered slipper tramples the new moon?

Haltingly she advances, swaying above the upturned faces and the shuffling feet.

In the dark unthought-of years men carried you thus down streets where drums throbbed and torches flared, bore you triumphantly, mourner and queen, followed you with shuffling feet and upturned faces. You it was who sat in the swirl of your robes at the granary door, and brought the orange maize black with mildew       or fat with milk, to the harvest:       and made the ewes to swell with twin lambs, or bleating, to sicken among the nibbling flock. You wept the dead youth laid lank and white in the empty hut, sat scarring your cheeks with the dark-cowled women. You brought the women safe through the shrieks and the shuddering pain of the birth of a child; and, when the sprouting spring poured fire in the blood of the young men, and made the he-goats dance stiff-legged in the sloping thyme-scented pastures, you were the full-lipped wanton enchantress who led on moonless nights, when it was very dark in the high valleys, the boys from the villages to find the herd-girls among the munching sweet-breathed cattle beside their fires of thyme-sticks, on their soft beds of sweet-fern.

 Many names have they called you, Lady of laughing and weeping, shuffling after you, borne on the necks of men down town streets with drums and red torches:       dolorous one, weeping the dead youth of the year ever dying, or full-breasted empress of summer, Lady of the Corybants and the headlong routs that maddened with cymbals and shouting the hot nights of amorous languor when the 

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