The Romany Girl - Ralph Waldo Emerson - 140 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Romany Girl - poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sun goes down, and with him takes
The coarseness of my poor attire;
The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame
Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher. 

The poem is less about a girl and more about himself. He refers to the poem to the wild and wandering nature that he has, just as we all have. But behind the social norms and curtain of convention, we all normally operate and mostly never give in to the meandering part of our souls. We all like to keep hanging by the threads of the world to belong to it, to somehow fit into it.


Romany, also generally spelled Romani, is the name of the Gypsy language though it sometimes doubles as a name for the people, as in Emerson’s title. “Gypsy” is an outsider’s word or a word for those who don't belong to a community or have roots from long ago. Visitors, wanderers, campers, nomads. Thus Emerson through the poem describes them as not someone new but a characteristic within us which is new to us. We seldom like to be wild, don't we? and are surprised when someone else amongst us shows quirky characters. So what do we term them as weird, an outsider or visitor. Who hopefully will shed this weird coat and become one of us!

Like many writers in the nineteenth century, Emerson's knowledge of the Gypsies was from George Borrow, a British author who learned to speak Romany and later wrote two novels about the people, Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857). Before these novels, Borrow also did an ethnographic study, based on his travels through Spain, called The Zincali (1841). Emerson was highly influenced by the book and was possibly inspired to write the poem.


“The Romany Girl” by Ralph Waldo Emerson was highly regarded in the nineteenth century, and  included in Emerson’s best work. It appeared in the magazines like Atlantic Monthly (1857). In the 1870s, George Fuller took the poem’s title for a painting, and this too was very popular.