Occitan song

Tell me how I find myself here, pale Fiammetta!
shaded in the draping, still solicitous for you,
after all, the leaves about your crown are only in a fetter
overseeing narrow birch and further vulnerable rue;
- so tell me how the gardener became a fire-setter?

and how the barkless branches take the brew;
Fiametta! when you've told me I will stand your ever-debtor,
even if I cannot help but think such upkeep is my due -

When the opening buds are burning but the petals will not die,
And we pass beds that are composted by whooping in their sleep,
You must show me, Fiammetta, where the brambles have to vie
for the chance to flourish gently and to confidently creep
around that bough that irrigates from savour back to sigh -

I'd slum in the silver garden shed beyond the bonfire heap.

To Charles Hepburn Johnston

You knew that odd satiety
about the troublingly arranged
times between sad dubiety,
and smiled thinly, when things changed;
You had better ways to leisure
that were stitched with light to measure.
I have listened for your pace,
walking past our common place,
slowly come to a conclusion
about you and him and it,
chomping at my fraying bit,
that grace isn't in seclusion
(necessarily at least),
And that enough, if sparing, is far better than a feast.

Companion Pieces

The Faerie Queene, Bk III, canto iii, stanza 50
as an Onegin sonnet

'The end is not,' old Merlin stuttered
(and the old fraud seemed quite unnerved),
If he saw ghosts, yet none he uttered,
But groaned and veered about and swerved,
As if to say 'Tudor succession
- in confidential confession -
Has flitted through the stable door;
It's Stuarts now, then Civil War.'
Well, Britomartya then, and Nursey
Recoiled back, as well they might
At such a startling sort of sight,
But Merlin, straightening out his Jersey
Adjusted to his former mien
As if unmoved by any scene.


Eugene Onegin, chapter 2, stanza 23
as a Spenserian stanza

Full neat as morning fitly doth she rise,
Lending my numbers (her lips warmly chaste)
The cleanness of her wheaten sapphire eyes,
The shining tressed bound, till Helga's waist
E'en braue Dan Petrarch would but haue defac'd:
As we in Virgil, or in Jeffrey read,
A goodliness, wherewith I once embrac'd,
Yet now must find it still most taedious grown,
So of the elder sister sing alone.