And a glass of wine, my daughter.”
“And what take her, little mother,
What gift shall I make her?”
“A kerchief of thorns, little daughter;
A loaf of black bread for her whom he wed,
And a cup of poison, my daughter!”
* * * * * *
Whether this is anything more than a fragment one may reasonably doubt, but no more than this was known to the reciter. This is of course the disadvantage of orally imparted poems, that a great portion is very often left out of the beginning, the end, or the middle. Sometimes, again, two different songs are combined into one. We can understand without much difficulty what was meant by sending the moon with a letter or message, and sending back the sun; it is not so obvious what the letter written upon the hazel-nut leaf implies. The explanation which seems the most probable is: This Roumanian peasant lover could not write. He had no means of sending a message unless the sun would be the messenger, nor of receiving a reply unless the moon would bring it. The peasants sometimes make calls by whistling against a leaf, as our peasant boys do with a piece of grass. This apparently is what is meant by the answer sent by a hazel-nut leaf. Possibly the rest of the poem, if there had been a remaining part, would have made the difficult points of this ballad more clear. We might have had a tragedy of the Ugo and Parisina sort. But all that is now covered up in night.
With one poem of a simple kind we will end this short selection:
List ye who love: