A Wall Flower
Amy Levy
I lounge in the doorway and languish in vain While Tom, Dick and Harry are dancing with Jane My spirit rises to the music’s beat; There is a leaden fiend lurks in my feet! To move unto your motion, Love, were sweet. Somewhere, I think, some other where, not here, In other ages, on another sphere, I danced with you, and you with me, my dear. In perfect motion did our bodies sway, To perfect music that was heard alway; Woe’s me, that am so dull of foot to-day! To move unto your motion, Love, were sweet; My spirit rises to the music’s beat— But, ah, the leaden demon in my feet!
Of note
The poem was first printed, as "A Wall-Flower," in the April 1889 issue of The Woman's World, the magazine Oscar Wilde was then editing. Wilde had recruited Levy as one of the new women writers he wanted in its pages.
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published April 1889 in The Woman’s World, vol. 2, p. 320, as “A Wall-Flower” · Collected in A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), p. 85 · Text from A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), via Project Gutenberg ebook 56974, checked against scans of the 1889 printing and Amy Levy: Collected Writings, ed. Luke Devine (2023).
A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), Project Gutenberg ebook 56974
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