Между колесами телег, Полузавешанных коврами, Горит огонь; семья кругом Готовит ужин; в чистом поле Пасутся кони; за шатром Ручной медведь лежит на воле.
Between the wheels of the carriages half-covered by hanging carpets burns a flame, and the family around it cooks supper; in the clear field the horses are at pasture; beyond the tent a tame bear lies uncaged.
The poem is written almost exclusively in iambic tetrameter, and this regular metre is established from the outset: Once the scene is set, the characters are introduced: an old man is waiting for his daughter Zemfira to return home while his dinner grows cold.
Уныло юноша глядел, На опустелую равнину И грусти тайную причину Истолковать себе не смел.
Zemfira asks Aleko if he misses the splendor of his homeland, but he responds that his only desire is to spend his life with her in voluntary exile.
We are wild; we have no laws We do not torture or execute – We have no need of blood or moans – But we don't want to live with a murderer... You are not born for the savage life You want freedom only for yourself.
The poem closes with an epilogue narrated in the first person, who warns that the gypsy encampments offer no freedom from the "fateful passions" and problems of life.
The poem addresses and interrogates the concept of the noble savage, an idea which had gained popular currency in the Romantic Age which held that those people who live further from "civilization" live "in harmony with nature and a more simple, childlike and blessed life" than the alienated and unhappy people in European cities.
The "Southern Poems" are indebted to Byron: they use exotic and orientalized settings, rapid transitions, and chart sexual and military conquest.
Michael Wachtel argues that "the grim, fatalistic acceptance of life as a tragedy and of individual experience as endless repetition brings the work closer to Antiquity than to Byron".
"[11] John Bayley argues that The Gypsies "shows the problem of a poet as naturally classical as Pushkin in an epoch fashionably and self-consciously romantic.