Gipsy Too - Analysis

A borrowed insult turned into a badge

The poem’s central move is simple and stubborn: the speaker takes a name used to dismiss him and makes it his own. In the pub at the Farmers’ Arms, the locals reduce his absence to a joke—down at the Gipsy camp—and the wider culture supplies the uglier version through newspaper mythmaking about wild Australians. Instead of pleading for respectability, the speaker answers with a refrain that feels like a clenched fist and a grin: he won’t care what the world says because he “came of the Gipsies too.” That insistence is less genealogy than chosen allegiance: he is aligning himself with mobility, marginality, and a life lived outside polite permission.

Shame and kinship in the word mongrel

The poem tightens its argument by repeating other people’s slurs—a mongrel lot, thieving, sly, roving, sulky, silent—and then turning them back on the speaker’s own history. The line I’d dined on fowls in the far-off south is a quick confession of rough living: whatever moral superiority the critics claim, the speaker has survived by the same improvisation. When he says, and a mongrel lot was I, it’s both self-accusation and self-release. The tension here is sharp: he refuses the insult, yet he also accepts it as an honest description of a mixed, unclassifiable self. Belonging arrives not through purity but through shared stigma.

The old queen’s palm: fate as a story that sticks

Midway, the poem changes from public talk to private prophecy. The old queen reads his palm and refuses to be charmed by his youth—you may laugh your laugh at me—before delivering the phrase that darkens the air: dead, dead past. Her authority isn’t explained, but the speaker treats her words as uncomfortably accurate: she told me all too true. The prediction—he will die in a camp—makes the refrain suddenly heavier. Until now, came of the Gipsies has sounded like defiance; after the palm-reading, it also sounds like a sentence. The poem holds two contradictory longings at once: to choose the wandering life, and to be unable to escape it.

The young queen’s eyes: romance as temporary homeland

If the old queen represents inherited fate, the young queen offers a different kind of belonging: immediate, bodily, intoxicating. The setting turns lush and close—a nook where the hedge grew tall, a sky swept clean, stars … bright, spring in the fields—and the speaker’s heart responds as if the world has been remade: new. Her eyes have the sheen of all, a deliberately excessive phrase that makes love feel like a total vision, as if everything good in the landscape has pooled in one gaze. The cry A Romany lass to a Romany lad briefly turns identity into celebration rather than defense. Yet the poem’s title and refrain keep the joy from settling into permanence: even at his most loved, he is still insisting, still proving, still naming himself.

Oceans, the Thames, and the ache of return without reunion

The final stanza widens the distance: wide, wild oceans now lie between the speaker and the camp, and time has moved—a Summer and Winter gone. The gipsies reappear not as a romantic backdrop but beside the sad old Thames, under blackberry hedges—a detail that feels thorny, tangled, and faintly bitter. The poem’s most painful admission arrives as an image rather than a confession: a roving star proved him untrue. The same roaming he once defended has turned into betrayal. Still, he does not ask for forgiveness or a second chance in life; he projects the meeting beyond it—when they gather the Gipsy souls. The refrain returns one last time, but now it sounds like resignation braided with hope: his identity carries him away from fidelity, and then promises a reunion only in the afterlife.

The hardest question the poem won’t stop asking

If the speaker chooses the gipsy life, why does it also read like a destiny spoken over him—first by the Daily Mail, then by the old queen, and finally by his own repeating line? The poem keeps pressing one unease: when you build a self out of wandering, do you gain freedom, or do you simply find a more poetic way to describe being unable to stay?