How Long the Night: Modern English Translations of Medieval Poems Written in Middle English and Old English/Anglo-Saxon English

How Long the Night
anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song ...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong,
now grieve, mourn and fast.

Originally published by Measure

Keywords/Tags: Old English, Middle English, Medieval English, long night, lament, complaint, alas, summer, pleasant, winter, north wind, northern wind, severe weather, storm, bird, birds, birdsong, sin, crime, fast, fasting, repentance, dark night of the soul, sackcloth and ashes, regret, repentance, remonstrance

These are modern English translations of Old English/Anglo-Saxon poems and Middle English poems by Anonymous, Caedmon, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Campion, Deor, William Dunbar, Godric of Finchale, Charles d'Orleans, Layamon and Sir Thomas Wyatt.



Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar (1460-1525)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.

Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but rue.

I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose and left her downcast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that I long to plant love's root again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.

My translation of "Lament for the Makaris" by William Dunbar appears later on this page.



"Now skruketh rose and lylie flour" is an early Middle English poem that gives a hint of things to come, in terms of meter and rhyme …

Now skruketh rose and lylie flour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 11th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now the rose and the lily skyward flower,
That will bear for awhile that sweet savor:
In summer, that sweet tide;
There is no queen so stark in her power
Nor any lady so bright in her bower
That Death shall not summon and guide;
But whoever forgoes lust, in heavenly bliss will abide
With his thoughts on Jesus anon, thralled at his side.

skruketh = break forth, burst open; stour = strong, stern, hardy; tharled = thralled?, made a serf?, bound?



Fowles in the Frith
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The fowls in the forest,
the fishes in the flood
and I must go mad:
such sorrow I've had
for beasts of bone and blood!

Sounds like an early animal rights activist! The use of "and" is intriguing … is the poet saying that his walks in the woods drive him mad because he's also a "beast of bone and blood" facing a similar fate? I must note, however, that this is my personal interpretation. The poem has "beste" and the poet may have meant "for the best of bone and blood" meaning some unidentified person, presumably.



Westron Wynde
(anonymous Middle English lyric, found in a partbook circa 1530 AD, but perhaps written earlier)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Western wind, when will you blow,
bringing the drizzling rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!

The original poem has "the smalle rayne down can rayne" which suggests a drizzle or mist.



This World's Joy
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters my thought:
regarding this world's joy,
how everything comes to naught.



Pity Mary
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now the sun passes under the wood:
I rue, Mary, thy face—fair, good.
Now the sun passes under the tree:
I rue, Mary, thy son and thee.

In the poem above, note how "wood" and "tree" invoke the cross while "sun" and "son" seem to invoke each other. Sun-day is also Son-day, to Christians. The anonymous poet who wrote the poem above may have been been punning the words "sun" and "son." The poem is also known as "Now Goeth Sun Under Wood" and "Now Go'th Sun Under Wood."



I am of Ireland
(anonymous Medieval Irish lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm of Ireland.
Gentlefolk, I pray thee:
for the sake of saintly charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland!



Whan the turuf is thy tour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

1.
When the turf is your tower
and the pit is your bower,
your pale white skin and throat
shall be sullen worms’ to note.
What help to you, then,
was all your worldly hope?

2.
When the turf is your tower
and the grave is your bower,
your pale white throat and skin
worm-eaten from within …
what hope of my help then?

The second translation leans more to the "lover's complaint" and carpe diem genres, with the poet pointing out to his prospective lover that by denying him her favors she make take her virtue to the grave where worms will end her virginity in macabre fashion. This poem may be an ancient precursor of poems like Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress."



Ech day me comëth tydinges thre
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Each day I’m plagued by three doles,
These gargantuan weights on my soul:
First, that I must somehow exit this fen.
Second, that I cannot know when.
And yet it’s the third that torments me so,
Because I don't know where the hell I will go!



Ich have y-don al myn youth
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have done it all my youth:
Often, often, and often!
I have loved long and yearned zealously …
And oh what grief it has brought me!



GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Three Roundels by Geoffrey Chaucer

I. Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.

By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.



II. Rejection
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.

I'm guiltless, yet my sentence has been cast.
I tell you truly, needless now to feign,—
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain.

Alas, that Nature in your face compassed
Such beauty, that no man may hope attain
To mercy, though he perish from the pain;
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.



III. Escape
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.

He may question me and counter this and that;
I care not: I will answer just as I mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean.

Love strikes me from his roster, short and flat,
And he is struck from my books, just as clean,
Forevermore; there is no other mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.



Welcome, Summer
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you’ve banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights’ frosts.
Saint Valentine, in the heavens aloft,
the songbirds sing your praises together!

Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you’ve banished Winter with her icy weather.

We have good cause to rejoice, not scoff,
since love’s in the air, and also in the heather,
whenever we find such blissful warmth, together.

Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you’ve banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights’ frosts.



CHARLES D'ORLEANS

Rondel: Your Smiling Mouth
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains,
Your hands so smooth, each finger straight and plain,
Your little feet—please, what more can I say?

It is my fetish when you’re far away
To muse on these and thus to soothe my pain—
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains.

So would I beg you, if I only may,
To see such sights as I before have seen,
Because my fetish pleases me. Obscene?
I’ll be obsessed until my dying day
By your sweet smiling mouth and eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains!



Spring
by Charles d’Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Young lovers,
greeting the spring
fling themselves downhill,
making cobblestones ring
with their wild leaps and arcs,
like ecstatic sparks
struck from coal.

What is their brazen goal?

They grab at whatever passes,
so we can only hazard guesses.
But they rear like prancing steeds
raked by brilliant spurs of need,
Young lovers.



Oft in My Thought
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

So often in my busy mind I sought,
    Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
    To give my lady dear;
    But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
        Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
    And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
         God keep her soul, I can no better say.

For me to keep my manner and my thought
    Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
    Her worth? It tests my power!
    I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
        For it would be a shame for me to stray
    Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near—
         God keep her soul, I can no better say.

Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
    And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
    Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
    And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
        As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
    Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
         God keep her soul, I can no better say.

When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
    Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
    God keep her soul, I can no better say.



Winter has cast his cloak away
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Winter has cast his cloak away
of wind and cold and chilling rain
to dress in embroidered light again:
the light of day—bright, festive, gay!
Each bird and beast, without delay,
in its own tongue, sings this refrain:
"Winter has cast his cloak away!"
Brooks, fountains, rivers, streams at play,
wear, with their summer livery,
bright beads of silver jewelry.
All the Earth has a new and fresh display:
Winter has cast his cloak away!

This rondeau was set to music by Debussy in his Trois chansons de France.



The year lays down his mantle cold
by Charles d’Orleans (1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

The year lays down his mantle cold
of wind, chill rain and bitter air,
and now goes clad in clothes of gold
of smiling suns and seasons fair,
while birds and beasts of wood and fold
now with each cry and song declare:
"The year lays down his mantle cold!"
All brooks, springs, rivers, seaward rolled,
now pleasant summer livery wear
with silver beads embroidered where
the world puts off its raiment old.
The year lays down his mantle cold.



Fair Lady Without Peer
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Fair Lady, without peer, my plea,
Is that your grace will pardon me,
Since I implore, on bended knee.
No longer can I, privately,
Keep this from you: my deep distress,
When only you can comfort me,
For I consider you my only mistress.

This powerful love demands, I fear,
That I confess things openly,
Since to your service I came here
And my helpless eyes were forced to see
Such beauty gods and angels cheer,
Which brought me joy in such excess
That I became your servant, gladly,
For I consider you my only mistress.

Please grant me this great gift most dear:
to be your vassal, willingly.
May it please you that, now, year by year,
I shall serve you as my only Liege.
I bend the knee here—true, sincere—
Unfit to beg one royal kiss,
Although none other offers cheer,
For I consider you my only mistress.



Chanson: Let Him Refrain from Loving, Who Can
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let him refrain from loving, who can.
I can no longer hover.
I must become a lover.
What will become of me, I know not.

Although I’ve heard the distant thought
that those who love all suffer,
I must become a lover.
I can no longer refrain.

My heart must risk almost certain pain
and trust in Beauty, however distraught.
For if a man does not love, then what?
Let him refrain from loving, who can.



Her Beauty
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Her beauty, to the world so plain,
Still intimately held my heart in thrall
And so established her sole reign:
She was, of Good, the cascading fountain.
Thus of my Love, lost recently,
I say, while weeping bitterly:
“We cleave to this strange world in vain.”

In ages past when angels fell
The world grew darker with the stain
Of their dear blood, then became hell
While poets wept a tearful strain.
Yet, to his dark and drear domain
Death took his victims, piteously,
So that we bards write bitterly:
“We cleave to this strange world in vain.”

Death comes to claim our angels, all,
as well we know, and spares no pain.
Over our pleasures, Death casts his pall,
Then without joy we “living” remain.
Death treats all Love with such disdain!
What use is this world? For it seems to me,
It has neither Love, nor Pity.
Thus “We cleave to this strange world in vain.”



Chanson: The Summer's Heralds
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The Summer’s heralds bring a dear
Sweet season of soft-falling showers
And carpet fields once brown and sere
With lush green grasses and fresh flowers.

Now over gleaming lawns appear
The bright sun-dappled lengthening hours.

The Summer’s heralds bring a dear
Sweet season of soft-falling showers.

Faint hearts once chained by sullen fear
No longer shiver, tremble, cower.
North winds no longer storm and glower.
For winter has no business here.



Traitorous Eye
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Traitorous eye, what’s new?
What lewd pranks do you have in view?
Without civil warning, you spy,
And no one ever knows why!

Who understands anything you do?
You’re rash and crass in your boldness too,
And your lewdness is hard to subdue.
Change your crude ways, can’t you?

Traitorous eye, what’s new?
You should be beaten through and through
With a stripling birch strap or two.
Traitorous eye, what’s new?
What lewd pranks do have you in view?



SIR THOMAS WYATT

“Whoso List to Hunt” has an alternate title, “The Lover Despairing to Attain Unto His Lady’s Grace Relinquisheth the Pursuit” and is commonly believed to have been written for Anne Boleyn, who married King Henry VIII only to be beheaded at his command when she failed to produce a male heir. (Ouch, talk about male chauvinism!)

Whoever Longs to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas!, I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
                                   Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
                                     I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Whoever seeks her out,
                                          I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.



Brut, an excerpt
by Layamon, circa 1100 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now he stands on a hill overlooking the Avon,
seeing steel fishes girded with swords in the stream,
their swimming days done,
their scales a-gleam like gold-plated shields,
their fish-spines floating like shattered spears.



Wulf and Eadwacer
(Old English poem circa 960-990 AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My people pursue him like crippled prey.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!

Wulf's on one island; I'm on another.
His island's a fortress, fastened by fens.
Here, bloodthirsty curs howl for carnage.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!

My thoughts pursued Wulf like panting hounds.
Whenever it rained, as I wept,
the bold warrior came; he took me in his arms:
good feelings, to a point, but the end loathsome!
Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your infrequent visits
have left me famished, deprived of real meat!
Do you hear, Eadwacer? Watchdog!
A wolf has borne our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.



Cædmon's Hymn (Old English circa 658-680 AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Come, let us honour      heaven-kingdom's Guardian,
the might of the Architect      and his mind-plans,
the work of the Glory-Father.      First he, the Everlasting Lord,
established      the foundation of wonders.
Then he, the Primeval Poet,      created heaven as a roof
for the sons of men,      Holy Creator,
Maker of mankind.      Then he, the Eternal Entity,
afterwards made men middle-earth:      Master Almighty!



A Proverb from Winfred's Time
anonymous Old English poem, circa 757-786 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

1.
The procrastinator puts off purpose,
never initiates anything marvelous,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.

2.
The late-deed-doer delays glory-striving,
never indulges daring dreams,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.

3.
Often the deed-dodger avoids ventures,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.



Franks Casket Runes
anonymous Old English poems, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The fish flooded the shore-cliffs;
the sea-king wept when he swam onto the shingle:
whale's bone.

Romulus and Remus, twin brothers weaned in Rome
by a she-wolf, far from their native land.



"The Leiden Riddle" is an Old English translation of Aldhelm's Latin riddle Lorica ("Corselet").

The Leiden Riddle
anonymous Old English riddle poem, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The dank earth birthed me from her icy womb.
I know I was not fashioned from woolen fleeces;
nor was I skillfully spun from skeins;
I have neither warp nor weft;
no thread thrums through me in the thrashing loom;
nor do whirring shuttles rattle me;
nor does the weaver's rod assail me;
nor did silkworms spin me like skillfull fates
into curious golden embroidery.
And yet heroes still call me an excellent coat.
Nor do I fear the dread arrows' flights,
however eagerly they leap from their quivers.

Solution: a coat of mail.



If you see a busker singing for tips, you're seeing someone carrying on an Anglo-Saxon tradition that goes back to the days of Beowulf …

He sits with his harp at his thane's feet,
Earning his hire, his rewards of rings,
Sweeping the strings with his skillful nail;
Hall-thanes smile at the sweet song he sings.
—"Fortunes of Men" loose translation by Michael R. Burch



Deor's Lament
(Anglo Saxon poem, circa 10th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Weland knew the agony of exile.
That indomitable smith was wracked by grief.
He endured countless troubles:
sorrows were his only companions
in his frozen island dungeon
after Nithad had fettered him,
many strong-but-supple sinew-bonds
binding the better man.
   That passed away; this also may.

Beadohild mourned her brothers' deaths
but even more, her own sad state
once she discovered herself with child.
She predicted nothing good could come of it.
   That passed away; this also may.

We have heard that the Geat's moans for Matilda,
his lady, were limitless,
that his sorrowful love for her
robbed him of regretless sleep.
   That passed away; this also may.

For thirty winters Theodric ruled
the Mæring stronghold with an iron hand;
many knew this and moaned.
   That passed away; this also may.

We have also heard of Ermanaric's wolfish ways,
of how he held wide sway in the realm of the Goths.
He was a grim king! Many a warrior sat,
full of cares and maladies of the mind,
wishing constantly that his kingdom might be overthrown.
   That passed away; this also may.

If a man sits long enough, sorrowful and anxious,
bereft of joy, his mind constantly darkening,
soon it seems to him that his troubles are endless.
Then he must consider that the wise Lord
often moves through the earth
granting some men honor, glory and fame,
but others only shame and hardship.
This I will say for myself:
that for awhile I was the Heodeninga's scop,
dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
For many winters I held a fine office,
faithfully serving a just lord. But now Heorrenda
a man skilful in songs, has received the estate
the protector of warriors gave me.
   That passed away; this also may.



The Wife's Lament
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I draw these words from deep wells of my grief,
care-worn, unutterably sad.
I can recount woes I've borne since birth,
present and past, never more than now.
I have won, from my exile-paths, only pain.

First, my lord forsook his folk, left,
crossed the seas' tumult, far from our people.
Since then, I've known
wrenching dawn-griefs, dark mournings … oh where,
where can he be?

Then I, too, left—a lonely, lordless refugee,
full of unaccountable desires!
But the man's kinsmen schemed secretly
to estrange us, divide us, keep us apart,
across earth's wide kingdom, and my heart broke.

Then my lord spoke:
"Take up residence here."
I had few friends in this unknown, cheerless
region, none close.
Christ, I felt lost!

Then I thought I had found a well-matched man –
one meant for me,
but unfortunately he
was ill-starred and blind, with a devious mind,
full of murderous intentions, plotting some crime!

Before God we
vowed never to part, not till kingdom come, never!
But now that's all changed, forever –
our friendship done, severed.
I must hear, far and near, contempt for my husband.

So other men bade me, "Go, live in the grove,
beneath the great oaks, in an earth-cave, alone."
In this ancient cave-dwelling I am lost and oppressed –
the valleys are dark, the hills immense,
and this cruel-briared enclosure—an arid abode!

The injustice assails me—my lord's absence!
On earth there are lovers who share the same bed
while I pass through life dead in this dark abscess
where I wilt, summer days unable to rest
or forget the sorrows of my life's hard lot.

A young woman must always be
stern, hard-of-heart, unmoved,
opposing breast-cares and her heartaches' legions.
She must appear cheerful
even in a tumult of grief.

Like a criminal exiled to a far-off land,
moaning beneath insurmountable cliffs,
my weary-minded love, drenched by wild storms
and caught in the clutches of anguish,
is reminded constantly of our former happiness.

Woe be it to them who abide in longing.



The Husband's Message
anonymous Old English poem, circa 960-990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

See, I unseal myself for your eyes only!
I sprang from a seed to a sapling,
waxed great in a wood,
                           was given knowledge,
was ordered across saltstreams in ships
where I stiffened my spine, standing tall,
till, entering the halls of heroes,
                   I honored my manly Lord.

Now I stand here on this ship’s deck,
an emissary ordered to inform you
of the love my Lord feels for you.
I have no fear forecasting his heart steadfast,
his honor bright, his word true.

He who bade me come carved this letter
and entreats you to recall, clad in your finery,
what you promised each other many years before,
mindful of his treasure-laden promises.

He reminds you how, in those distant days,
witty words were pledged by you both
in the mead-halls and homesteads:
how he would be Lord of the lands
you would inhabit together
while forging a lasting love.

Alas, a vendetta drove him far from his feuding tribe,
but now he instructs me to gladly give you notice
that when you hear the returning cuckoo's cry
cascading down warming coastal cliffs,
come over the sea! Let no man hinder your course.

He earnestly urges you: Out! To sea!
Away to the sea, when the circling gulls
hover over the ship that conveys you to him!

Board the ship that you meet there:
sail away seaward to seek your husband,
over the seagulls' range,
                          over the paths of foam.
For over the water, he awaits you.

He cannot conceive, he told me,
how any keener joy could comfort his heart,
nor any greater happiness gladden his soul,
than that a generous God should grant you both
to exchange rings, then give gifts to trusty liege-men,
golden armbands inlaid with gems to faithful followers.

The lands are his, his estates among strangers,
his new abode fair and his followers true,
all hardy heroes, since hence he was driven,
shoved off in his ship from these shore in distress,
steered straightway over the saltstreams, sped over the ocean,
a wave-tossed wanderer winging away.

But now the man has overcome his woes,
outpitted his perils, lives in plenty, lacks no luxury,
has a hoard and horses and friends in the mead-halls.

All the wealth of the earth's great earls
now belongs to my Lord …
                                             He only lacks you.

He would have everything within an earl's having,
if only my Lady will come home to him now,
if only she will do as she swore and honor her vow.



Led By Christ and Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

By Christ and Saint Mary I was so graciously led
that the earth never felt my bare foot’s tread!

Crist and sainte marie swa on scamel me iledde
þat ic on þis erðe ne silde wid mine bare fote itredie



A Cry to Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I.
Saintë Marië Virginë,
Mother of Jesus Christ the Nazarenë,
Welcome, shield and help thin Godric,
Fly him off to God’s kingdom rich!

II.
Saintë Marië, Christ’s bower,
****** among Maidens, Motherhood’s flower,
Blot out my sin, fix where I’m flawed,
Elevate me to Bliss with God!



Prayer to St. Nicholas
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Saint Nicholas, beloved of God,
Build us a house that’s bright and fair;
Watch over us from birth to bier,
Then, Saint Nicholas, bring us safely there!

Sainte Nicholaes godes druð
tymbre us faire scone hus
At þi burth at þi bare
Sainte nicholaes bring vs wel þare



The Rhymed Poem aka The Rhyming Poem and The Riming Poem
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

He who granted me life created this sun
and graciously provided its radiant engine.
I was gladdened with glees, bathed in bright hues,
deluged with joy’s blossoms, sunshine-infused.

Men admired me, feted me with banquet-courses;
we rejoiced in the good life. Gaily bedecked horses
carried me swiftly across plains on joyful rides,
delighting me with their long limbs' thunderous strides.
That world was quickened by earth’s fruits and their flavors!
I cantered under pleasant skies, attended by troops of advisers.
Guests came and went, amusing me with their chatter
as I listened with delight to their witty palaver.

Well-appointed ships glided by in the distance;
when I sailed myself, I was never without guidance.
I was of the highest rank; I lacked for nothing in the hall;
nor did I lack for brave companions; warriors, all,
we strode through castle halls weighed down with gold
won from our service to thanes. We were proud men, and bold.
Wise men praised me; I was omnipotent in battle;
Fate smiled on and protected me; foes fled before me like cattle.
Thus I lived with joy indwelling; faithful retainers surrounded me;
I possessed vast estates; I commanded all my eyes could see;
the earth lay subdued before me; I sat on a princely throne;
the words I sang were charmed; old friendships did not wane …

Those were years rich in gifts and the sounds of happy harp-strings,
when a lasting peace dammed shut the rivers’ sorrowings.
My servants were keen, their harps resonant;
their songs pealed, the sound loud but pleasant;
the music they made melodious, a continual delight;
the castle hall trembled and towered bright.
Courage increased, wealth waxed with my talent;
I gave wise counsel to great lords and enriched the valiant.

My spirit enlarged; my heart rejoiced;
good faith flourished; glory abounded; abundance increased.
I was lavishly supplied with gold; bright gems were circulated …
Till treasure led to treachery and the bonds of friendship constricted.

I was bold in my bright array, noble in my equipage,
my joy princely, my home a happy hermitage.
I protected and led my people;
for many years my life among them was regal;
I was devoted to them and they to me.

But now my heart is troubled, fearful of the fates I see;
disaster seems unavoidable. Someone dear departs in flight by night
who once before was bold. His soul has lost its light.
A secret disease in full growth blooms within his breast,
spreads in different directions. Hostility blossoms in his chest,
in his mind. Bottomless grief assaults the mind's nature
and when penned in, erupts in rupture,
burns eagerly for calamity, runs bitterly about.

The weary man suffers, begins a journey into doubt;
his pain is ceaseless; pain increases his sorrows, destroys his bliss;
his glory ceases; he loses his happiness;
he loses his craft; he no longer burns with desires.
Thus joys here perish, lordships expire;
men lose faith and descend into vice;
infirm faith degenerates into evil’s curse;
faith feebly abandons its high seat and every hour grows worse.

So now the world changes; Fate leaves men lame;
Death pursues hatred and brings men to shame.
The happy clan perishes; the spear rends the marrow;
the evildoer brawls and poisons the arrow;
sorrow devours the city; old age castrates courage;
misery flourishes; wrath desecrates the peerage;
the abyss of sin widens; the treacherous path snakes;
resentment burrows, digs in, wrinkles, engraves;
artificial beauty grows foul;
the summer heat cools;
earthly wealth fails;
enmity rages, cruel, bold;
the might of the world ages, courage grows cold.
Fate wove itself for me and my sentence was given:
that I should dig a grave and seek that grim cavern
men cannot avoid when death comes, arrow-swift,
to seize their lives in his inevitable grasp.
Now night comes at last,
and the way stand clear
for Death to dispossesses me of my my abode here.

When my corpse lies interred and the worms eat my limbs,
whom will Death delight then, with his dark feast and hymns?
Let men’s bones become one,
and then finally, none,
till there’s nothing left here of the evil ones.
But men of good faith will not be destroyed;
the good man will rise, far beyond the Void,
who chastened himself, more often than not,
to avoid bitter sins and that final black Blot.
The good man has hope of a far better end
and remembers the promise of Heaven,
where he’ll experience the mercies of God for his saints,
freed from all sins, dark and depraved,
defended from vices, gloriously saved,
where, happy at last before their cheerful Lord,
men may rejoice in his love forevermore.



Adam Lay Ybounden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Adam lay bound, bound in a bond;
Four thousand winters, he thought, were not too long.
And all was for an apple, an apple that he took,
As clerics now find written in their book.
But had the apple not been taken, or had it never been,
We'd never have had our Lady, heaven's queen.
So blesséd be the time the apple was taken thus;
Therefore we sing, "God is gracious!"

The poem has also been rendered as "Adam lay i-bounden" and "Adam lay i-bowndyn."



I Sing of a Maiden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I sing of a maiden
That is matchless.
The King of all Kings
For her son she chose.

He came also as still
To his mother's breast
As April dew
Falling on the grass.

He came also as still
To his mother's bower
As April dew
Falling on the flower.

He came also as still
To where his mother lay
As April dew
Falling on the spray.

Mother and maiden?
Never one, but she!
Well may such a lady
God's mother be!



Tegner's Drapa
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I heard a voice, that cried,
“Balder the beautiful lies dead, lies dead …”
a voice like the flight of white cranes
intent on a sun sailing high overhead—
but a sun now irretrievably setting.

Then I saw the sun’s corpse
—dead beyond all begetting—
borne through disconsolate skies
as blasts from the Nifel-heim rang out with dread,
“Balder lies dead, our fair Balder lies dead! …”

Lost—the sweet runes of his tongue,
so sweet every lark hushed its singing!
Lost, lost forever—his beautiful face,
the grace of his smile, all the girls’ hearts wild-winging!
O, who ever thought such strange words might be said,
as “Balder lies dead, gentle Balder lies dead! …”



Lament for the Makaris (Makers, or Poets)
by William Dunbar (1460-1525)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

i who enjoyed good health and gladness
am overwhelmed now by life’s terrible sickness
and enfeebled with infirmity …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

our presence here is mere vainglory;
the false world is but transitory;
the flesh is frail; the Fiend runs free …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

the state of man is changeable:
now sound, now sick, now blithe, now dull,
now manic, now devoid of glee …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

no state on earth stands here securely;
as the wild wind shakes the willow tree,
so wavers this world’s vanity …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

Death leads the knights into the field
(unarmored under helm and shield)
sole Victor of each red mêlée …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

that strange, despotic Beast
tears from its mother’s breast
the babe, full of benignity …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

He takes the champion of the hour,
the captain of the highest tower,
the beautiful damsel in her tower …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

He spares no lord for his elegance,
nor clerk for his intelligence;
His dreadful stroke no man can flee …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

artist, magician, scientist,
orator, debater, theologist,
must all conclude, so too, as we:
“how the fear of Death dismays me!”

in medicine the most astute
sawbones and surgeons all fall mute;
they cannot save themselves, or flee …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

i see the Makers among the unsaved;
the greatest of Poets all go to the grave;
He does not spare them their faculty …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

i have seen Him pitilessly devour
our noble Chaucer, poetry’s flower,
and Lydgate and Gower (great Trinity!) …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

since He has taken my brothers all,
i know He will not let me live past the fall;
His next prey will be — poor unfortunate me! …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

there is no remedy for Death;
we all must prepare to relinquish breath
so that after we die, we may be set free
from “the fear of Death dismays me!”



Fairest Between Lincoln and Lindsey
(anonymous Middle English poem, circa late 13th century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When the nightingale sings, the woods turn green;
Leaf and grass again blossom in April, I know,
Yet love pierces my heart with its spear so keen!
Night and day it drinks my blood. The painful rivulets flow.

I’ve loved all this year. Now I can love no more;
I’ve sighed many a sigh, sweetheart, and yet all seems wrong.
For love is no nearer and that leaves me poor.
Sweet lover, think of me — I’ve loved you so long!



Sumer is icumen in
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1260 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sing now cuckoo! Sing, cuckoo!
Sing, cuckoo! Sing now cuckoo!

Summer is a-comin'!
Sing loud, cuckoo!
The seed grows,
The meadow blows,
The woods spring up anew.
Sing, cuckoo!

The ewe bleats for her lamb;
The cows contentedly moo;
The bullock roots;
The billy-goat poots …
Sing merrily, cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo,
You sing so well, cuckoo!
Never stop, until you're through!



The Maiden Lay in the Wilds
circa the 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The maiden in the moor lay,
in the moor lay;
seven nights full,
seven nights full,
the maiden in the moor lay,
in the moor lay,
seven nights full and a day.

Sweet was her meat.
But what was her meat?
The primrose and the—
The primrose and the—
Sweet was her meat.
But what was her meat?
The primrose and the violet.

Pure was her drink.
But what was her drink?
The cold waters of the—
The cold waters of the—
Pure was her drink.
But what was her drink?
The cold waters of the well-spring.

Bright was her bower.
But what was her bower?
The red rose and the—
The red rose and the—
Bright was her bower.
But what was her bower?
The red rose and the lily flower.



The World an Illusion
circa 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This is the sum of wisdom bright:
however things may appear,
life vanishes like birds in flight;
now it’s here, now there.
Nor are we mighty in our “might”—
now on the bench, now on the bier.
However vigilant or wise,
in health it’s death we fear.
However proud and without peer,
no man’s immune to tragedy.
And though we think all’s solid here,
this world is but a fantasy.

The sun’s course we may claim to know:
arises east, sets in the west;
we know which way earth’s rivers flow,
into the seas that fill and crest.
The winds rush here and there, also,
it rains and snows without arrest.
Will it all end? God only knows,
with the wisdom of the Blessed,
while we on earth remain hard-pressed,
all bedraggled, or too dry,
until we vanish, just a guest:
this world is but a fantasy.



Trust Only Yourself
circa the 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Alas! Deceit lies in trust now,
dubious as Fortune, spinning like a ball,
as brittle when tested as a rotten bough.
He who trusts in trust is ripe for a fall!
Such guile in trust cannot be trusted,
or a man will soon find himself busted.
Therefore, “Be wary of trust!” is my advice.
Trust only yourself and learn to be wise.



See, Here, My Heart
circa the 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

O, mankind,
please keep in mind
where Passions start:
there you will find
me wholly kind—
see, here, my heart.



How Death Comes
circa the 13th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When my eyes mist
and my ears hiss
and my nose grows cold
as my tongue folds
and my face grows slack
as my lips grow black
and my mouth gapes
as my spit forms lakes
and my hair falls
as my heart stalls
and my hand shake
as my feet quake:
All too late! All too late!
When the bier is at the gate.

Then I shall pass
from bed to floor,
from floor to shroud,
from shroud to bier,
from bier to grave,
the grave closed forever!
Then my house will rest on my nose.
This world’s not worth a farthing, Heaven knows!



Johann Scheffler (1624-1677), also known as Johann Angelus Silesius, was a German Catholic priest and physician, known as a mystic and religious poet. He's a bit later than most of the other poets on this page, but seems to fit in …

Unholy Trinity
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Man has three enemies:
himself, the world, and the devil.
Of these the first is, by far,
the most irresistible evil.

True Wealth
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

There is more to being rich
than merely having;
the wealthiest man can lose
everything not worth saving.

The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The rose merely blossoms
and never asks why:
heedless of her beauty,
careless of every eye.

The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The rose lack “reasons”
and merely sways with the seasons;
she has no ego
but whoever put on such a show?

Eternal Time
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Eternity is time,
time eternity,
except when we
are determined to "see."

Visions
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Our souls possess two eyes:
one examines time,
the other visions
eternal and sublime.

Godless
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

God is absolute Nothingness
beyond our sense of time and place;
the more we try to grasp Him,
The more He flees from our embrace.

The Source
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Water is pure and clean
when taken at the well-head:
but drink too far from the Source
and you may well end up dead.

Ceaseless Peace
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Unceasingly you seek
life's ceaseless wavelike motion;
I seek perpetual peace, all storms calmed.
Whose is the wiser notion?

Well Written
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Friend, cease!
Abandon all pretense!
You must yourself become
the Writing and the Sense.

Worm Food
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

No worm is buried
so deep within the soil
that God denies it food
as reward for its toil.

Mature Love
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

New love, like a sparkling wine, soon fizzes.
Mature love, calm and serene, abides.

God's Predicament
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

God cannot condemn those with whom he would dwell,
or He would have to join them in hell!

Clods
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A ruby
is not lovelier
than a dirt clod,
nor an angel
more glorious
than a frog.



The original poem below is based on my teenage misinterpretation of a Latin prayer …

Elegy for a little girl, lost
by Michael R. Burch

… qui laetificat juventutem meam …
She was the joy of my youth,
and now she is gone.
… requiescat in pace …
May she rest in peace.
… amen …
Amen.

I was touched by this Latin prayer, which I discovered in a novel I read as a teenager. I later decided to incorporate it into a poem. From what I now understand, “ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” means “to the God who gives joy to my youth,” but I am sticking with my original interpretation: a lament for a little girl at her funeral. The phrase can be traced back to Saint Jerome's translation of Psalm 42 in the Vulgate Latin Bible (circa 385 AD).

From the depression of the distances with respect to the horizontal and the planes that separated them from the surface, below the references that came against, single sediment had been destined towards the high eminence, before the fossal of megatons of aldehyde below the bilges of the final base, where the seventh rings of the goat ibex were perforated, all in the antipode of the Constellation of Capricornus; where the goats were enraptured in the binary of Wonthelimar, behind the floods of absorption that took the Diadocos far from where they should never have left, in order to extrasolar wishes and never to come. From the node of the supreme and poked aldehyde of the horn of Amalthea, with the bizarre analogy of Zeus and Wonthelimar, both mammals with milk from goat's udders, one from goat from Mount Ida and the other from Aldaine in the Alps, with milk from ibex and In the face of Amalthea that appeared in the fossal, all the Seleucid generals had already vanished, starting from the Viper Typhon, who in the retracting sub-mythology of Capricornus was transmigrated to Wonthelimar, swollen with the aldehyde transmuted into this alcohol and into the udder milk of the Ibix that He lactored, while they were all carried away as in the chambers of Auschwitz, in distant lanterns and lamps of the Calypso that he dismissed them, leaving them with the escorts of the ibex or goatfish in laudable stratagems, which vanished them away from their desires from a new polis or Nostos Patrída, sprinkling them with goatskin and flourishing essences of the kashmar of Zeus' nurse; Amaltheum or Amalthea.

The Iberian rings from the medrones in advance reached the two final ring nodes, here Wonthelimar intimidated them with an accurate adjacent bleat of the kashmar that rubbed their back, before the newest and last lux of Amalthea that vanished into herbaceous fruits that always He carried the barefoot medron with him, to start with the antlers dumbbells and re-transport them defeated to the species of snake that frightened the pastoral god Pan who shepherded, and then he submerged in the water after becoming Capricornus Ibex Fish. Being aware of this and of those who refused to continue listening, Ibics rings were unleashed until the seventh medron, feeding back with Wonthelimar who ad libitum created Venus in triads of Zeus. Wonthelimar and Amalthea were remote in the eighth and ninth medron of the antlers, they appropriated to each the portion of the Parasha or Parashot of the Torah, and of the thirteenth Shemot so that their dualities and fumes from the unbreathable fossa would remain under the possessed surface of the pendular property balance and positive-negative gender correspondence. Right here Amalthea transmuted her mercy to save the world with her lactation of syrup and honey that was not in short supply, and that was extrapolated into a future abundance of food and nectar, making up for crusts that were uneven in average terms. From this bezel, both beings of the goat genome contributed to the pole of goodness for each one at the end of the benevolent cuirassiers of prospering, and not from the opposite that would lead them, even though they were dissimilar causes, towards a retrograde event that was not a consequence of the becoming of the plagues, and of the malignancy that does not flourish with the Shemot of the Parasha, to agree and lavish themselves on blessed virtues or deliberate wicked ones.

The meaning of a relative synchronic and factotum coexisting does not redeem the disintegration of an existential relativism in Skalá, the Hexagonal Primogeniture from one of its angular visions, metaphysically transfers from its temporary contingencies after its arrival on Patmos, while the temporary Seleucid temporality vanishes, It was affirmed from a contradiction since its truth was distended in the arena of Skalá not implying being welcomed, rather it was victimized by the absurd political dimorphism in a meta spiritual state, abdicating its dispersed retrospective, and now contemplating a compromise of the Hellenic genre, to gradually rebuke the virtues of their banners, twice as good for the purpose of reinforcing the will to accede, and not perish in the attempt to lead Alexander the Great. The criticism of founding the memories are of a revived past where it was not, marking the anthropological fact and false truth judgment, in meaning and contradiction in the polarity of both axiomatic genres, but that is saved when quantifying in who has to defend himself, if seeks to abrogate itself, in the entity that is characterized by induction and attraction of egonies and not of exo-egonies, thus describing it in the theme of "Do not support egos that recriminate other characters of frustration and empowerment of a Vernarthian logic split into Vern-narth. Vern has etymology of Bern or Bern olive tree of Gethsemane and narth of the ordinal scale that speculates its nickname in millions of northern sections of its origin, which subsumes the truth and the criterion of apocalyptic parapsychology, re-life of quantum historicity of the metaphysical and sub-block. -Mythological of Vernarth in his identical.

Everything seemed a strange self-annulment from a clear and understandable limit, but Wonthelimar rose to the surface of the Állos kósmos, finding himself in atmospheres of truth and reality of a Cantabile, who decided about the horse Kanti coming with him towing him from the Erebo de Chauvet Bilocated. As a musical and festive ending, he received them on the upper plate of the happened gestures, where a cabaletta rendered parts of a Cantabrian aria, in sulfurous and remorseful cavatina married with the cross emotions of a finale who sponsored expressions and festive Templar tales, with the descendants of Zeus or minor children, or grandchildren after this had to give him milk and honey but with báchkoi. Among the couplets that received him, some came about the smoke of terror that was confused with the dustbin of a Cavallo or horse acclaimed Kanti, with gasping bustling from a cardex, containing all the repertoires of a cantabile if this scene were to be repeated in The same epic allusion, and in random consequences, that go after a cavalcade that is not abstracted in real characters, but more in conformity with the well-deserved place of epic imaginative beings or in the operatic psychotropic of a duet, which would go flagellating in individuality and in each which is not content from another section of the Cantabrian.

The Universality of emotion and feeling is a tragic Parodo emulating voices of all those who sing from a cantabile galloping in their voices to the beat of the heart in some, and at the same time chanting stanzas and antistrophe in reverse epic and tragic lines, for the purposes of the coliseum that diametrically obstructs the Hellenic choir, which is attached to the intervention of the Hexagonal Primogeniture that was already beginning to rise in height, and in the prayers of Saint John, the Apostle and Prochorus from the captaincy and the ode that would begin to stanza, from the west to this and the antistrophe would follow with Vernarth, Wonthelimar and Alexander the Great from east to west. Ad libitum of their enjoyments, they were eating Greek snacks or Katogorias on the way in bases of Almonds, cinnamon, olive oil, sugar, and sweet wine that they carried on their backs in Rhytas shaped like the horns of Zeus and the Ibix of Wonthelimar, which the same Procorus carried on his golden back. The meaning is affirmed as a meaningless infringement of laws of temporality, and truthfulness at the expense of short evidence, and of facts that vanish in the light haze of causalism and not of effectism, when the adjective or noun is made of a strong verb in the Metabasis and in the imprecations that Vernarth gave.

Vernarth's metabasis: “the verse and the adjective will be subsidized by the noun in the construction of Állos Kosmo Megarón, from where mathematics will immaterially explain sap suckers under the noun in liquid milk of the color white and of the high nutritional value in female lactated, and of mammals to feed their goats or ibex. The soul of this prerogative implies that the verb will be to promote species rather than a nutritious milky elixir for Zeus, and the candor of his **** will tend to the bipedal or quadruped subject self-procreating from a Milky Specie. (Milky species).  Being ****** into milk by self-procreating snitches. Vernarth says (give me some milk, and I will be the son of Zeus, perhaps as a means in everything and not a whole of which I never thought...!)

Amalthea in rituals and relics from prospects of demigods was purposely cordoning them off in Mycenaean deities, from a contemporary Westerner comforting them near a hippocampus; with signs of ibex Capricornus, rapt at the nymph that spoke from Mount Ida in Crete and that she made congruent with the constellation of Capricornus, more precisely in the Cornucopia making this heraldry of Wonthelimar with Fortune, Abundance, Occasion, Liberality, Prudence and Joy. In a woman sitting on a throne, a young nymph with a flower crown, a naked woman with one foot on a wheel and the other unstable, a woman with sunken eyes and an aquiline nose dressed in white, two faces from the past and future, a woman happy with the exuberance of the Cornucopia with children and a palm leaf. Being the abundance that in serial Amalthea bordered all the ladies in different esoteric and Mycenaean prosperity, constantly shining with radiations on the present in the Unicorn Ibix, which Zeus left after breaking its antlers, unleashing kindness and plethora in fruit buds, and vegetables that were appropriated in the Fortune of Wonthelimar reissuing what in their domains they can do, and now in Patmos with its Cornupia being transferred from that liquefied shaft honey and milk cultivated with attributes of herbs contributing to the leisure, peace, and relaxation of the cosmic world that ascended in Wonthelimar as Ibix in advance of Capricornus, from where the Auriga always broke into his expeditions with a trajectory towards the eighth cemetery of Messolonghi, where he brought it from the Capella Star for the femurs of the Diplodocuses who seconded Drestnia to watch over the hydraulic pits of the Koumeterium from Messolonghi, before traveling to Tangier.

The entire herd went back to an ancient promontory that was halfway up the mound towards the black styes or abscesses, in the central intuition of the fossa that began to dissipate towards their backs. Amalthea extends into the Állos Kósmos, which came in zoomorphic receptacles collecting the announced blood of the animals that flowed in black planks from the vortex of the fossal, towards the liminal or transitory sleeper of the fossal that oozed acetosities of the Aldehyde to be transmigrated after the bilocation of the Chauvet cavern. All wore willow halos on the crowns or diadems of their caps, including the proliferation of phantasmagoric Allies that went in rows from 780 to 680 BC. C., with fortunes of the Cornucopia that arched in magical arches due to the dissociative changes of the universe, as well as the circumstantial creed of some omnipotence that will cause emotional transgenerational transgression, in the rain vessels that they made fall from the Ombrio de Zeus, in a daily latticework closing the spaces, and only leaving for some intruders and onlookers to see his flashing Astrepé. Right here the diádoc fossal vanished, when it rose above the horizontal that poured into the Chronic Vernagrams of parapsychological personalities of ingenuity classicism and in Astro-concomitance, which would rethink everything that is past and future from a Vernagram, which is more than a compression of a mere future of the quantum spaces and the sacred medrones of the Ibixes with their direct relationship with Capricornus. Diverse capital moments were treasured in the breeze of the Vas Auric that was traced from the opposing moraine that fell in lapse-time, through the labyrinth in storms and thunderings that became planetary with the Lynothorax cuirass that Alexander the Great accommodated in the festoon border of his Aspis Koilé, kicking copiously as a sign of shaking the head of the gods who deceived him to be alive, and who was now reborn in the faith of Saint John the Apostle, favorite of the Mashiach and where he will have to wipe his face with the shroud of Veronica Before entering the Állos Kósmos Megaron that everyone built, in favor of a Panagia or Temple, unlocking the majolica that seeped out from the rest of the transmigration, and his own in the configuration of a corpse with a tricolor gesture.

The presumptive eradicated the side of the forearm rots that was being restored in Wonthelimar's laps, which helped him get up and catch his breath while the Katogorias snack filled his mouth with nectar and almonds with Macedonian Psiloi combat tactics with serum and flames of Alcohol dripped from her nostrils and sinuses in the sweet wine, which in pompous dilemma defied the judges of her life in the choir of the Bilocated Epidary Theater on Patmos, and in the ***** dry Kashmar of the orchard with the pale faces of the grotesque, that rested in the memory or Mnmosyne and in the fauna of the Thracian and Thessalian helmets.

Alexander the Great says: “here I agonized and now in the fresh waters of the springs of the Lerna, I will also marry the glorious mystay and bákchoi, in the memories of Vernarth seeing him besieged by Achaemenides in the stooped position of Dario III, to come purifying and sustaining of my limbs, learning to walk and speak in Neolithic techniques, which extruded me from the Lerna by barriers of the moon that shone from the bronze of my Leonatus helmet. Thus I could see that Vernarth, fought alone against thousands throwing fire through his mouth and his eyes, separating the waters of the Falangists, who plowed like ships deforesting the Persians, and leaving them in their mud, imposing glorious Hypaspists who unbolted from their back some arrows with heads of snakes and Hydras.

Vernarth watched as everyone climbed the Profitis Ilias mound, two hundred and sixty-nine meters above sea level, where the monastery of San Juan is located; here he was suspended in his solitude after everything that happened at the end of the moat that definitely I would return without the Diádocos, with a hint and its functionalities. From here Helios became genealogical, who snatched him from the kingdom of dead flowers, which were to be assumed from the Olympian where he will join him to the essential of Aïdoneus; immaterializing in the darkness of dizzies and the flowers that died in the genealogy of a new species. The scenic swept its cognitive and ferns with more than three hundred frank species that frowned like the enemy of an evil friend, with seedlings that expectorated from the resonance of the bushes that invited to thrive in the salty ripples that made a dreamer fall asleep on top of the kerchiefs or brambles that memorialized Gethsemane, burning his face and hands with psalms, telling him about his Baba. For when it is a luminary by night and by day, they will compare it with the white grayish drupes and mops, like those of the Bern orchard of Olives, in aqueous and resinous colloidal, which was crowned in harmony and syntropia in Vernarth activating intellectual conscious plantations, which will restructure its balance of ultra Hoplite, in metabolism of the Lentiscus flowers, with great brotherhood in the Olives that each time exercised the gift of bending their oleaginous self-species, towards planes of the Cornicabra olives, with large branches and high tree altitude that fruit within of the Cornucopia that he now carried on his back, supported by an oiko spin, juxtaposed with the fibula on the right shoulder of his lymphoma, which with large branches and high tree altitude fruit within the Cornucopia that he now carried on his back, supported by an oiko line juxtaposed with the fibula on the right shoulder of his lymphoma, and with polyphenols in scale geothermal energy that still leveled the Ponto Sea towards the tectonic plate to give it the flavor that was owed from remote prehistoric times.

Patmos was aborted from an immanent consent and new force of the impending enemy in Pythagorean perorations and an offending thought. From this prerogative is born the generalized punishment of sub-mythological ethics in favor of legacies of allusions to reorder or defragment the enslaving and demolished bio culture, which would begin from the establishment of the Vas Auric found in Limassol, which took possession from Rhodes with clean scenes from Tsambika monastery. The epic ran like icy cold down the shoulders of all those who sweated for the generation of cops, and in domestic evasions in superior lordships to Hades or Wonthelimar itself, both sons of flocks and goats that nourished them by providing them with a mountain perspective, as a magnetic pole towards gothic energy that ruled more in the Magnetic North Pole, and the geographic oversize that reviled latitudes in riches that would dismiss Borker and Zefian, as masters distributors of the ethics of the Áullos Kósmos of Patmos, redeploying thousands of dead from pre-Hellenic times, so that they recirculate through the roots of the Kashmar, re-sulfurizing cinnabar saps as the germ of the subterranean Acheron, which consecrates the living and the dead in the eternity of the infinite Duoverse Universe. The order will lie in semi-shadows that even in the dark provide the pleasant warmth of camphor, with advanced Horcondising formulas, which will appeal to hungry souls by suppressing gifted energies, and by inseminating them with ovules without originally conceived organisms.

From Hylates, Cyprus; Zefian came by order of Vernarth, assisted with the extension of the earthly laborers of the Attic Calendar on the twenty-first of September, from the device of Apollo at the site of Boeotia, and especially of the Boedromion. The arrows that Zefian brought had an instant Boedromion crossing the lines from spring to winter, with seven arrows that Zefian threw into the sky and never fell, but if portentously received in the virginity of animals. The flora with seven golden arrows of the Chauvet de Wonthelmar cavern, condoned the exhaustive end of the fossal where they still remained, in a gesture of tenderness and relative Mycenaean genealogy, from Crete the contravention of Apollo and Artemis towards an olive tree was approaching, originating in the Zefian's arrows, to mark the new cardinal points, begin with the first two arrows that they put on the string of the bow, each one flying north and south trajectories and the other two that were once again attacked with the east bow, to shoot the arrows of east-west with southern magnetism limits. Zefian's imagination was of proportions that were not limited without wandering from their phalanxes when they pulled the string, like joys of a ghostly existence that pushed him in each bolt, presuming that where they fell would be the beginning of the storms that would originate the Állos Kósmos Megarón, for belated courts imposed from a cosmos, which he led by insisting on his will and from a doubtful Vestal god advocating the association of the hospitable Canephores, such as Vestal Virgins of Roman bilocation, and quantum parapsychological of the feared inter-tale alive that rebels in the arrows that they had not yet fallen and did not know their whereabouts. As plates or serial hosts, they were evoked from where the origin of the Universe was broken, to open towards the organic, vigorous, and anti-burn contravened Duoverse to the divine celestial origin as a parameter of *****-ovule, rather in aeonic instances in the fireplace of Hestia, running in eternities towards vast volumes of light-years, where eternity has no measure, let alone the existence that begins and ends born from a homozygous arising without a Universe, to hatch from the branch of the Heterozygous Duoverse, bringing different unions of eternal cells by universal divine decree, and not the union of disparate cells. The science of the Mashiach came in these divine arrows that marked the points of the cardinal in the numinous and exclamatory expansions of the exiled universe of Vernarth, towards the perenniality in itself, but being heterozygous for a world that would begin to live in non-organic cells, but yes of divine composition, over saturating the limits of the origin, and destiny of syntropy of the conscious actions of the metabolism of the Alma Mater and of the great doors when losing the bodyweight of the physical-ether, but yes from the platform of the Mashiach that will take them hands without leaving them abandoned, showing them that they were no longer children born of ovule-*****, but rather in the luminous matter, envisioning expansions of prayers beyond from the universe, where it will accompany them in a multidimensional plane..., and will have no end from a human scientific conception.

Wonthelimar says: “Since the omphalos was swallowed by Cronos, Hera's elegy was unleashed, for not raising her son Zeus in free clumps of goats and Ida's honey. I in the Alps went to the herd of the Ibix like a Zeus saved from the darkness of Chauvet in the mountains of Gaul. There are chisels that cut stones in beautiful whirlwinds, but I know that a lot of cosmology would not speak of the Mediterranean Cornicabra and its olive drupe, nor less of the Cornucopia that sinks with sumptuous and ephebian flavors in the fruit, and the greenish heraldry of the binominal that is disturbed in its phalanges eating and sipping honey, in antler pots with pride of the Ida and the Vercors massif”

The banker sits for his lunch. He sits with his superiors. They ask, “how do you?” He replies, “Good, and you sir?” After pleasantries comes food. Everyone ordered a salad. Food is picked at with dashes of chatter. After food comes business. Business among superiors. The banker sits quietly using his wasted acting talents on feigning interest. He twiddles thumbs, smacks gums, and adjusts weight from one flank to the other.
The bored banker nods conformatively. When addressed, his name varies from Tim to Tom to Jack. They were close it was Al. He fills in facts and numbers the optimates don’t care to recall themselves. It’s the only use he has at lunch. Those superior to the banker could have brought his report he made up for this occasion. But, there is an air of aristocracy when one has a serf accompany his master to a meeting of patricians. Like all courtly meetings, the barons and governors hide slights in compliments, cloak ambition in kindness. Use pens as daggers, dried ink as poison.
It’s not the banker’s place to notice such things, it is place to serve those who deserve his servitude. Every time he services his lordships, his tie gets tighter, his skin looser, and his bald spot increase its diameter.
The bored and defeated banker rises with the Bourgeoisie, clings to their heels, and gets the door. His lunch is over. His break is done. Back to his desk he retreats. Back to work. His time as a squire is done. Until his masters call upon him again. For lunch.

The say inherit after seeing the success of other inheritances
But in other circumstances it’s more of coincidence
And sheer luck that one can be of such providence
Revered across the land in his time
By multitudes as much as the grains of sand you can find
Blinded by his love and trust of man
His life he did forfeit in his prime
But his memory is well imbued with mine
The blood of a great ruler courses through these veins
Of Chiefs of Kings of Lordships that string a long line
Chief Chivi Shumba Murambwi

O'er shingle tossed on raggèd shore,
In awe I gaped that vast array
Of gleaming waves, a teeming store
Of natures bounty in the bay,
Reflecting with each crest and trough
Mosaic fragments of the sky
That echoed on the high-flung bluff
'Neath where stood I.

If God e'er laid a dint or breach
For beauty's sake, this land divine
Is refuge when the storm winds preach,
When rains flow like communion wine;
Each pebble strewn, yet seemly placed
In knitted weave, as tho' on high
A seamstress sewed her pattern, traced
To pleaseth I.

Oh any heart but mine rejoice
To taste this salted spray;
The longing of mine own device
Lays far beyond the bay.

To stand beneath the mizzen-mast,
Upon an isle of polished teak,
Surrendered to the winded flax
Wild-dancing round with every creak;
From port to starboard, fore and aft,
No land, nor ship, nor blot on high,
Wouldst dare encroach the mindful craft
That carries I.

What yearning heart has heard her call,
That siren? Oh the sailor's sea,
In beauty does she rise and fall,
Enchanting is her melody;
Too deep her eyes of coral blue
Wherein she takes, as is her wont,
Unwary souls to charters new,
The Lordships and the débutante.

*And unto her, when wearied age
Makes breathless every sigh
And bones become a prison cage,
Will answer I.

This World's Joy: The Best Medieval Poems in Modern English Translations by Michael R. Burch

These are my modern English translations of Middle English and Old English/Anglo-Saxon poems poems by Anonymous, Caedmon, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Campion, Deor, William Dunbar, Godric of Finchale, Charles d'Orleans, Layamon and Sir Thomas Wyatt.




This World's Joy
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1300
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters my thought:
regarding this world's joy,
how everything comes to naught.

[MS. Harl. 2253. f. 49r]

The original Middle English text:

Wynter wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare.
Ofte y sike ant mourne sare
When hit cometh in my thoht
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht.

“This World’s Joy” or “Wynter wakeneth al my care” is one of the earliest surviving winter poems in English literature and an early rhyming poem as well.  Edward Bliss Reed dated the poem to around 1310, around 30 years before the birth of Geoffrey Chaucer, and said it was thought to have been composed in Leominster, Herefordshire. I elected to translate the first stanza as a poem in its own right. Keywords/Tags: Middle English, translation, anonymous, rhyme, rhyming, medieval, lament, lamentation, care, cares, sighs, winter, trees, leafless, bare, barren, barrenness, emptiness, isolation, alienation, joy, joys



How Long the Night
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song …
but now I feel the northern wind's blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.



Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar (1460-1525)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.

Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but rue.

I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose and left her downcast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that I long to plant love's root again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.

My translation of "Lament for the Makaris" by William Dunbar appears later on this page.



I Have Labored Sore
(anonymous medieval lyric circa the fifteenth century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have labored sore          and suffered death,
so now I rest           and catch my breath.
But I shall come      and call right soon
heaven and earth          and hell to doom.
Then all shall know           both devil and man
just who I was               and what I am.



A Lyke-Wake Dirge
(anonymous medieval lyric circa the 16th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The Lie-Awake Dirge is “the night watch kept over a corpse.”

This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.

When from this earthly life you pass
every night and all,
to confront your past you must come at last,
and Christ receive thy soul.

If you ever donated socks and shoes,
every night and all,
sit right down and slip yours on,
and Christ receive thy soul.

But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk barefoot through the flames of hell,
and Christ receive thy soul.

If ever you shared your food and drink,
every night and all,
the fire will never make you shrink,
and Christ receive thy soul.

But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk starving through the black abyss,
and Christ receive thy soul.

This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.



Excerpt from “Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt?”
(anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1275)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Where are the men who came before us,
who led hounds and hawks to the hunt,
who commanded fields and woods?
Where are the elegant ladies in their boudoirs
who braided gold through their hair
and had such fair complexions?

Once eating and drinking gladdened their hearts;
they enjoyed their games;
men bowed before them;
they bore themselves loftily …
But then, in an eye’s twinkling,
they were gone.

Where now are their songs and their laughter,
the trains of their dresses,
the arrogance of their entrances and exits,
their hawks and their hounds?
All their joy has vanished;
their “well” has come to “oh, well”
and to many dark days …



"Now skruketh rose and lylie flour" is an early Middle English poem that gives a hint of things to come, in terms of meter and rhyme …

Now skruketh rose and lylie flour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 11th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now the rose and the lily skyward flower,
That will bear for awhile that sweet savor:
In summer, that sweet tide;
There is no queen so stark in her power
Nor any lady so bright in her bower
That Death shall not summon and guide;
But whoever forgoes lust, in heavenly bliss will abide
With his thoughts on Jesus anon, thralled at his side.

skruketh = break forth, burst open; stour = strong, stern, hardy; tharled = thralled?, made a serf?, bound?



Fowles in the Frith
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The fowls in the forest,
the fishes in the flood
and I must go mad:
such sorrow I've had
for beasts of bone and blood!

Sounds like an early animal rights activist! The use of "and" is intriguing … is the poet saying that his walks in the woods drive him mad because he's also a "beast of bone and blood" facing a similar fate? I must note, however, that this is my personal interpretation. The poem has "beste" and the poet may have meant "for the best of bone and blood" meaning some unidentified person, presumably.



Westron Wynde
(anonymous Middle English lyric, found in a partbook circa 1530 AD, but perhaps written earlier)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Western wind, when will you blow,
bringing the drizzling rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!

The original poem has "the smalle rayne down can rayne" which suggests a drizzle or mist.



Pity Mary
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now the sun passes under the wood:
I rue, Mary, thy face—fair, good.
Now the sun passes under the tree:
I rue, Mary, thy son and thee.

In the poem above, note how "wood" and "tree" invoke the cross while "sun" and "son" seem to invoke each other. Sun-day is also Son-day, to Christians. The anonymous poet who wrote the poem above may have been been punning the words "sun" and "son." The poem is also known as "Now Goeth Sun Under Wood" and "Now Go'th Sun Under Wood."



I am of Ireland
(anonymous Medieval Irish lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm of Ireland.
Gentlefolk, I pray thee:
for the sake of saintly charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland!



Whan the turuf is thy tour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

1.
When the turf is your tower
and the pit is your bower,
your pale white skin and throat
shall be sullen worms’ to note.
What help to you, then,
was all your worldly hope?

2.
When the turf is your tower
and the grave is your bower,
your pale white throat and skin
worm-eaten from within …
what hope of my help then?

The second translation leans more to the "lover's complaint" and carpe diem genres, with the poet pointing out to his prospective lover that by denying him her favors she make take her virtue to the grave where worms will end her virginity in macabre fashion. This poem may be an ancient precursor of poems like Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress."



Ech day me comëth tydinges thre
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Each day I’m plagued by three doles,
These gargantuan weights on my soul:
First, that I must somehow exit this fen.
Second, that I cannot know when.
And yet it’s the third that torments me so,
Because I don't know where the hell I will go!



Ich have y-don al myn youth
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have done it all my youth:
Often, often, and often!
I have loved long and yearned zealously …
And oh what grief it has brought me!



GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Three Roundels by Geoffrey Chaucer

I. Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.

By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.



II. Rejection
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.

I'm guiltless, yet my sentence has been cast.
I tell you truly, needless now to feign,—
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain.

Alas, that Nature in your face compassed
Such beauty, that no man may hope attain
To mercy, though he perish from the pain;
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.



III. Escape
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.

He may question me and counter this and that;
I care not: I will answer just as I mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean.

Love strikes me from his roster, short and flat,
And he is struck from my books, just as clean,
Forevermore; there is no other mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.



Welcome, Summer
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you’ve banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights’ frosts.
Saint Valentine, in the heavens aloft,
the songbirds sing your praises together!

Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you’ve banished Winter with her icy weather.

We have good cause to rejoice, not scoff,
since love’s in the air, and also in the heather,
whenever we find such blissful warmth, together.

Now welcome, Summer, with your sun so soft,
since you’ve banished Winter with her icy weather
and driven away her long nights’ frosts.



CHARLES D'ORLEANS

Rondel: Your Smiling Mouth
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains,
Your hands so smooth, each finger straight and plain,
Your little feet—please, what more can I say?

It is my fetish when you’re far away
To muse on these and thus to soothe my pain—
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains.

So would I beg you, if I only may,
To see such sights as I before have seen,
Because my fetish pleases me. Obscene?
I’ll be obsessed until my dying day
By your sweet smiling mouth and eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains!



Spring
by Charles d’Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Young lovers,
greeting the spring
fling themselves downhill,
making cobblestones ring
with their wild leaps and arcs,
like ecstatic sparks
struck from coal.

What is their brazen goal?

They grab at whatever passes,
so we can only hazard guesses.
But they rear like prancing steeds
raked by brilliant spurs of need,
Young lovers.



Oft in My Thought
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

So often in my busy mind I sought,
    Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
    To give my lady dear;
    But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
        Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
    And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
         God keep her soul, I can no better say.

For me to keep my manner and my thought
    Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
    Her worth? It tests my power!
    I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
        For it would be a shame for me to stray
    Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near—
         God keep her soul, I can no better say.

Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
    And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
    Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
    And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
        As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
    Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
         God keep her soul, I can no better say.

When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
    Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
    God keep her soul, I can no better say.



Winter has cast his cloak away
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Winter has cast his cloak away
of wind and cold and chilling rain
to dress in embroidered light again:
the light of day—bright, festive, gay!
Each bird and beast, without delay,
in its own tongue, sings this refrain:
"Winter has cast his cloak away!"
Brooks, fountains, rivers, streams at play,
wear, with their summer livery,
bright beads of silver jewelry.
All the Earth has a new and fresh display:
Winter has cast his cloak away!

This rondeau was set to music by Debussy in his Trois chansons de France.



The year lays down his mantle cold
by Charles d’Orleans (1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

The year lays down his mantle cold
of wind, chill rain and bitter air,
and now goes clad in clothes of gold
of smiling suns and seasons fair,
while birds and beasts of wood and fold
now with each cry and song declare:
"The year lays down his mantle cold!"
All brooks, springs, rivers, seaward rolled,
now pleasant summer livery wear
with silver beads embroidered where
the world puts off its raiment old.
The year lays down his mantle cold.



Fair Lady Without Peer
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Fair Lady, without peer, my plea,
Is that your grace will pardon me,
Since I implore, on bended knee.
No longer can I, privately,
Keep this from you: my deep distress,
When only you can comfort me,
For I consider you my only mistress.

This powerful love demands, I fear,
That I confess things openly,
Since to your service I came here
And my helpless eyes were forced to see
Such beauty gods and angels cheer,
Which brought me joy in such excess
That I became your servant, gladly,
For I consider you my only mistress.

Please grant me this great gift most dear:
to be your vassal, willingly.
May it please you that, now, year by year,
I shall serve you as my only Liege.
I bend the knee here—true, sincere—
Unfit to beg one royal kiss,
Although none other offers cheer,
For I consider you my only mistress.



Chanson: Let Him Refrain from Loving, Who Can
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let him refrain from loving, who can.
I can no longer hover.
I must become a lover.
What will become of me, I know not.

Although I’ve heard the distant thought
that those who love all suffer,
I must become a lover.
I can no longer refrain.

My heart must risk almost certain pain
and trust in Beauty, however distraught.
For if a man does not love, then what?
Let him refrain from loving, who can.



Her Beauty
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Her beauty, to the world so plain,
Still intimately held my heart in thrall
And so established her sole reign:
She was, of Good, the cascading fountain.
Thus of my Love, lost recently,
I say, while weeping bitterly:
“We cleave to this strange world in vain.”

In ages past when angels fell
The world grew darker with the stain
Of their dear blood, then became hell
While poets wept a tearful strain.
Yet, to his dark and drear domain
Death took his victims, piteously,
So that we bards write bitterly:
“We cleave to this strange world in vain.”

Death comes to claim our angels, all,
as well we know, and spares no pain.
Over our pleasures, Death casts his pall,
Then without joy we “living” remain.
Death treats all Love with such disdain!
What use is this world? For it seems to me,
It has neither Love, nor Pity.
Thus “We cleave to this strange world in vain.”



Chanson: The Summer's Heralds
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The Summer’s heralds bring a dear
Sweet season of soft-falling showers
And carpet fields once brown and sere
With lush green grasses and fresh flowers.

Now over gleaming lawns appear
The bright sun-dappled lengthening hours.

The Summer’s heralds bring a dear
Sweet season of soft-falling showers.

Faint hearts once chained by sullen fear
No longer shiver, tremble, cower.
North winds no longer storm and glower.
For winter has no business here.



Traitorous Eye
by Charles d’Orleans
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Traitorous eye, what’s new?
What lewd pranks do you have in view?
Without civil warning, you spy,
And no one ever knows why!

Who understands anything you do?
You’re rash and crass in your boldness too,
And your lewdness is hard to subdue.
Change your crude ways, can’t you?

Traitorous eye, what’s new?
You should be beaten through and through
With a stripling birch strap or two.
Traitorous eye, what’s new?
What lewd pranks do have you in view?



SIR THOMAS WYATT

“Whoso List to Hunt” has an alternate title, “The Lover Despairing to Attain Unto His Lady’s Grace Relinquisheth the Pursuit” and is commonly believed to have been written for Anne Boleyn, who married King Henry VIII only to be beheaded at his command when she failed to produce a male heir. (Ouch, talk about male chauvinism!)

Whoever Longs to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation by Michael R. Burch

Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas!, I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
                                   Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
                                     I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Whoever seeks her out,
                                          I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.



Brut, an excerpt
by Layamon, circa 1100 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now he stands on a hill overlooking the Avon,
seeing steel fishes girded with swords in the stream,
their swimming days done,
their scales a-gleam like gold-plated shields,
their fish-spines floating like shattered spears.



Wulf and Eadwacer
(Old English poem circa 960-990 AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My people pursue him like crippled prey.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!

Wulf's on one island; I'm on another.
His island's a fortress, fastened by fens.
Here, bloodthirsty curs howl for carnage.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!

My thoughts pursued Wulf like panting hounds.
Whenever it rained, as I wept,
the bold warrior came; he took me in his arms:
good feelings, to a point, but the end loathsome!
Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your infrequent visits
have left me famished, deprived of real meat!
Do you hear, Eadwacer? Watchdog!
A wolf has borne our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.



Cædmon's Hymn (Old English circa 658-680 AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Come, let us honour      heaven-kingdom's Guardian,
the might of the Architect      and his mind-plans,
the work of the Glory-Father.      First he, the Everlasting Lord,
established      the foundation of wonders.
Then he, the Primeval Poet,      created heaven as a roof
for the sons of men,      Holy Creator,
Maker of mankind.      Then he, the Eternal Entity,
afterwards made men middle-earth:      Master Almighty!



A Proverb from Winfred's Time
anonymous Old English poem, circa 757-786 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

1.
The procrastinator puts off purpose,
never initiates anything marvelous,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.

2.
The late-deed-doer delays glory-striving,
never indulges daring dreams,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.

3.
Often the deed-dodger avoids ventures,
never succeeds, dies dead alone.



Franks Casket Runes
anonymous Old English poems, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The fish flooded the shore-cliffs;
the sea-king wept when he swam onto the shingle:
whale's bone.

Romulus and Remus, twin brothers weaned in Rome
by a she-wolf, far from their native land.



"The Leiden Riddle" is an Old English translation of Aldhelm's Latin riddle Lorica ("Corselet").

The Leiden Riddle
anonymous Old English riddle poem, circa 700 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The dank earth birthed me from her icy womb.
I know I was not fashioned from woolen fleeces;
nor was I skillfully spun from skeins;
I have neither warp nor weft;
no thread thrums through me in the thrashing loom;
nor do whirring shuttles rattle me;
nor does the weaver's rod assail me;
nor did silkworms spin me like skillfull fates
into curious golden embroidery.
And yet heroes still call me an excellent coat.
Nor do I fear the dread arrows' flights,
however eagerly they leap from their quivers.

Solution: a coat of mail.



If you see a busker singing for tips, you're seeing someone carrying on an Anglo-Saxon tradition that goes back to the days of Beowulf …

He sits with his harp at his thane's feet,
Earning his hire, his rewards of rings,
Sweeping the strings with his skillful nail;
Hall-thanes smile at the sweet song he sings.
—"Fortunes of Men" loose translation by Michael R. Burch



Deor's Lament
(Anglo Saxon poem, circa 10th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Weland knew the agony of exile.
That indomitable smith was wracked by grief.
He endured countless troubles:
sorrows were his only companions
in his frozen island dungeon
after Nithad had fettered him,
many strong-but-supple sinew-bonds
binding the better man.
   That passed away; this also may.

Beadohild mourned her brothers' deaths
but even more, her own sad state
once she discovered herself with child.
She predicted nothing good could come of it.
   That passed away; this also may.

We have heard that the Geat's moans for Matilda,
his lady, were limitless,
that his sorrowful love for her
robbed him of regretless sleep.
   That passed away; this also may.

For thirty winters Theodric ruled
the Mæring stronghold with an iron hand;
many knew this and moaned.
   That passed away; this also may.

We have also heard of Ermanaric's wolfish ways,
of how he held wide sway in the realm of the Goths.
He was a grim king! Many a warrior sat,
full of cares and maladies of the mind,
wishing constantly that his kingdom might be overthrown.
   That passed away; this also may.

If a man sits long enough, sorrowful and anxious,
bereft of joy, his mind constantly darkening,
soon it seems to him that his troubles are endless.
Then he must consider that the wise Lord
often moves through the earth
granting some men honor, glory and fame,
but others only shame and hardship.
This I will say for myself:
that for awhile I was the Heodeninga's scop,
dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
For many winters I held a fine office,
faithfully serving a just lord. But now Heorrenda
a man skilful in songs, has received the estate
the protector of warriors gave me.
   That passed away; this also may.



The Wife's Lament
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I draw these words from deep wells of my grief,
care-worn, unutterably sad.
I can recount woes I've borne since birth,
present and past, never more than now.
I have won, from my exile-paths, only pain.

First, my lord forsook his folk, left,
crossed the seas' tumult, far from our people.
Since then, I've known
wrenching dawn-griefs, dark mournings … oh where,
where can he be?

Then I, too, left—a lonely, lordless refugee,
full of unaccountable desires!
But the man's kinsmen schemed secretly
to estrange us, divide us, keep us apart,
across earth's wide kingdom, and my heart broke.

Then my lord spoke:
"Take up residence here."
I had few friends in this unknown, cheerless
region, none close.
Christ, I felt lost!

Then I thought I had found a well-matched man –
one meant for me,
but unfortunately he
was ill-starred and blind, with a devious mind,
full of murderous intentions, plotting some crime!

Before God we
vowed never to part, not till kingdom come, never!
But now that's all changed, forever –
our friendship done, severed.
I must hear, far and near, contempt for my husband.

So other men bade me, "Go, live in the grove,
beneath the great oaks, in an earth-cave, alone."
In this ancient cave-dwelling I am lost and oppressed –
the valleys are dark, the hills immense,
and this cruel-briared enclosure—an arid abode!

The injustice assails me—my lord's absence!
On earth there are lovers who share the same bed
while I pass through life dead in this dark abscess
where I wilt, summer days unable to rest
or forget the sorrows of my life's hard lot.

A young woman must always be
stern, hard-of-heart, unmoved,
opposing breast-cares and her heartaches' legions.
She must appear cheerful
even in a tumult of grief.

Like a criminal exiled to a far-off land,
moaning beneath insurmountable cliffs,
my weary-minded love, drenched by wild storms
and caught in the clutches of anguish,
is reminded constantly of our former happiness.

Woe be it to them who abide in longing.



The Husband's Message
anonymous Old English poem, circa 960-990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

See, I unseal myself for your eyes only!
I sprang from a seed to a sapling,
waxed great in a wood,
                           was given knowledge,
was ordered across saltstreams in ships
where I stiffened my spine, standing tall,
till, entering the halls of heroes,
                   I honored my manly Lord.

Now I stand here on this ship’s deck,
an emissary ordered to inform you
of the love my Lord feels for you.
I have no fear forecasting his heart steadfast,
his honor bright, his word true.

He who bade me come carved this letter
and entreats you to recall, clad in your finery,
what you promised each other many years before,
mindful of his treasure-laden promises.

He reminds you how, in those distant days,
witty words were pledged by you both
in the mead-halls and homesteads:
how he would be Lord of the lands
you would inhabit together
while forging a lasting love.

Alas, a vendetta drove him far from his feuding tribe,
but now he instructs me to gladly give you notice
that when you hear the returning cuckoo's cry
cascading down warming coastal cliffs,
come over the sea! Let no man hinder your course.

He earnestly urges you: Out! To sea!
Away to the sea, when the circling gulls
hover over the ship that conveys you to him!

Board the ship that you meet there:
sail away seaward to seek your husband,
over the seagulls' range,
                          over the paths of foam.
For over the water, he awaits you.

He cannot conceive, he told me,
how any keener joy could comfort his heart,
nor any greater happiness gladden his soul,
than that a generous God should grant you both
to exchange rings, then give gifts to trusty liege-men,
golden armbands inlaid with gems to faithful followers.

The lands are his, his estates among strangers,
his new abode fair and his followers true,
all hardy heroes, since hence he was driven,
shoved off in his ship from these shore in distress,
steered straightway over the saltstreams, sped over the ocean,
a wave-tossed wanderer winging away.

But now the man has overcome his woes,
outpitted his perils, lives in plenty, lacks no luxury,
has a hoard and horses and friends in the mead-halls.

All the wealth of the earth's great earls
now belongs to my Lord …
                                             He only lacks you.

He would have everything within an earl's having,
if only my Lady will come home to him now,
if only she will do as she swore and honor her vow.



Led By Christ and Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

By Christ and Saint Mary I was so graciously led
that the earth never felt my bare foot’s tread!

Crist and sainte marie swa on scamel me iledde
þat ic on þis erðe ne silde wid mine bare fote itredie



A Cry to Mary
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I.
Saintë Marië Virginë,
Mother of Jesus Christ the Nazarenë,
Welcome, shield and help thin Godric,
Fly him off to God’s kingdom rich!

II.
Saintë Marië, Christ’s bower,
****** among Maidens, Motherhood’s flower,
Blot out my sin, fix where I’m flawed,
Elevate me to Bliss with God!



Prayer to St. Nicholas
by Saint Godric of Finchale (1065-1170)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Saint Nicholas, beloved of God,
Build us a house that’s bright and fair;
Watch over us from birth to bier,
Then, Saint Nicholas, bring us safely there!

Sainte Nicholaes godes druð
tymbre us faire scone hus
At þi burth at þi bare
Sainte nicholaes bring vs wel þare



The Rhymed Poem aka The Rhyming Poem and The Riming Poem
anonymous Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

He who granted me life created this sun
and graciously provided its radiant engine.
I was gladdened with glees, bathed in bright hues,
deluged with joy’s blossoms, sunshine-infused.

Men admired me, feted me with banquet-courses;
we rejoiced in the good life. Gaily bedecked horses
carried me swiftly across plains on joyful rides,
delighting me with their long limbs' thunderous strides.
That world was quickened by earth’s fruits and their flavors!
I cantered under pleasant skies, attended by troops of advisers.
Guests came and went, amusing me with their chatter
as I listened with delight to their witty palaver.

Well-appointed ships glided by in the distance;
when I sailed myself, I was never without guidance.
I was of the highest rank; I lacked for nothing in the hall;
nor did I lack for brave companions; warriors, all,
we strode through castle halls weighed down with gold
won from our service to thanes. We were proud men, and bold.
Wise men praised me; I was omnipotent in battle;
Fate smiled on and protected me; foes fled before me like cattle.
Thus I lived with joy indwelling; faithful retainers surrounded me;
I possessed vast estates; I commanded all my eyes could see;
the earth lay subdued before me; I sat on a princely throne;
the words I sang were charmed; old friendships did not wane …

Those were years rich in gifts and the sounds of happy harp-strings,
when a lasting peace dammed shut the rivers’ sorrowings.
My servants were keen, their harps resonant;
their songs pealed, the sound loud but pleasant;
the music they made melodious, a continual delight;
the castle hall trembled and towered bright.
Courage increased, wealth waxed with my talent;
I gave wise counsel to great lords and enriched the valiant.

My spirit enlarged; my heart rejoiced;
good faith flourished; glory abounded; abundance increased.
I was lavishly supplied with gold; bright gems were circulated …
Till treasure led to treachery and the bonds of friendship constricted.

I was bold in my bright array, noble in my equipage,
my joy princely, my home a happy hermitage.
I protected and led my people;
for many years my life among them was regal;
I was devoted to them and they to me.

But now my heart is troubled, fearful of the fates I see;
disaster seems unavoidable. Someone dear departs in flight by night
who once before was bold. His soul has lost its light.
A secret disease in full growth blooms within his breast,
spreads in different directions. Hostility blossoms in his chest,
in his mind. Bottomless grief assaults the mind's nature
and when penned in, erupts in rupture,
burns eagerly for calamity, runs bitterly about.

The weary man suffers, begins a journey into doubt;
his pain is ceaseless; pain increases his sorrows, destroys his bliss;
his glory ceases; he loses his happiness;
he loses his craft; he no longer burns with desires.
Thus joys here perish, lordships expire;
men lose faith and descend into vice;
infirm faith degenerates into evil’s curse;
faith feebly abandons its high seat and every hour grows worse.

So now the world changes; Fate leaves men lame;
Death pursues hatred and brings men to shame.
The happy clan perishes; the spear rends the marrow;
the evildoer brawls and poisons the arrow;
sorrow devours the city; old age castrates courage;
misery flourishes; wrath desecrates the peerage;
the abyss of sin widens; the treacherous path snakes;
resentment burrows, digs in, wrinkles, engraves;
artificial beauty grows foul;
the summer heat cools;
earthly wealth fails;
enmity rages, cruel, bold;
the might of the world ages, courage grows cold.
Fate wove itself for me and my sentence was given:
that I should dig a grave and seek that grim cavern
men cannot avoid when death comes, arrow-swift,
to seize their lives in his inevitable grasp.
Now night comes at last,
and the way stand clear
for Death to dispossesses me of my my abode here.

When my corpse lies interred and the worms eat my limbs,
whom will Death delight then, with his dark feast and hymns?
Let men’s bones become one,
and then finally, none,
till there’s nothing left here of the evil ones.
But men of good faith will not be destroyed;
the good man will rise, far beyond the Void,
who chastened himself, more often than not,
to avoid bitter sins and that final black Blot.
The good man has hope of a far better end
and remembers the promise of Heaven,
where he’ll experience the mercies of God for his saints,
freed from all sins, dark and depraved,
defended from vices, gloriously saved,
where, happy at last before their cheerful Lord,
men may rejoice in his love forevermore.



Adam Lay Ybounden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Adam lay bound, bound in a bond;
Four thousand winters, he thought, were not too long.
And all was for an apple, an apple that he took,
As clerics now find written in their book.
But had the apple not been taken, or had it never been,
We'd never have had our Lady, heaven's queen.
So blesséd be the time the apple was taken thus;
Therefore we sing, "God is gracious!"

The poem has also been rendered as "Adam lay i-bounden" and "Adam lay i-bowndyn."



I Sing of a Maiden
(anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I sing of a maiden
That is matchless.
The King of all Kings
For her son she chose.

He came also as still
To his mother's breast
As April dew
Falling on the grass.

He came also as still
To his mother's bower
As April dew
Falling on the flower.

He came also as still
To where his mother lay
As April dew
Falling on the spray.

Mother and maiden?
Never one, but she!
Well may such a lady
God's mother be!



Tegner's Drapa
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I heard a voice, that cried,
“Balder the beautiful lies dead, lies dead …”
a voice like the flight of white cranes
intent on a sun sailing high overhead—
but a sun now irretrievably setting.

Then I saw the sun’s corpse
—dead beyond all begetting—
borne through disconsolate skies
as blasts from the Nifel-heim rang out with dread,
“Balder lies dead, our fair Balder lies dead! …”

Lost—the sweet runes of his tongue,
so sweet every lark hushed its singing!
Lost, lost forever—his beautiful face,
the grace of his smile, all the girls’ hearts wild-winging!
O, who ever thought such strange words might be said,
as “Balder lies dead, gentle Balder lies dead! …”



Lament for the Makaris (Makers, or Poets)
by William Dunbar (1460-1525)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

i who enjoyed good health and gladness
am overwhelmed now by life’s terrible sickness
and enfeebled with infirmity …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

our presence here is mere vainglory;
the false world is but transitory;
the flesh is frail; the Fiend runs free …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

the state of man is changeable:
now sound, now sick, now blithe, now dull,
now manic, now devoid of glee …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

no state on earth stands here securely;
as the wild wind shakes the willow tree,
so wavers this world’s vanity …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

Death leads the knights into the field
(unarmored under helm and shield)
sole Victor of each red mêlée …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

that strange, despotic Beast
tears from its mother’s breast
the babe, full of benignity …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

He takes the champion of the hour,
the captain of the highest tower,
the beautiful damsel in her tower …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

He spares no lord for his elegance,
nor clerk for his intelligence;
His dreadful stroke no man can flee …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

artist, magician, scientist,
orator, debater, theologist,
must all conclude, so too, as we:
“how the fear of Death dismays me!”

in medicine the most astute
sawbones and surgeons all fall mute;
they cannot save themselves, or flee …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

i see the Makers among the unsaved;
the greatest of Poets all go to the grave;
He does not spare them their faculty …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

i have seen Him pitilessly devour
our noble Chaucer, poetry’s flower,
and Lydgate and Gower (great Trinity!) …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

since He has taken my brothers all,
i know He will not let me live past the fall;
His next prey will be — poor unfortunate me! …
how the fear of Death dismays me!

there is no remedy for Death;
we all must prepare to relinquish breath
so that after we die, we may be set free
from “the fear of Death dismays me!”



Fairest Between Lincoln and Lindsey
(anonymous Middle English poem, circa late 13th century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When the nightingale sings, the woods turn green;
Leaf and grass again blossom in April, I know,
Yet love pierces my heart with its spear so keen!
Night and day it drinks my blood. The painful rivulets flow.

I’ve loved all this year. Now I can love no more;
I’ve sighed many a sigh, sweetheart, and yet all seems wrong.
For love is no nearer and that leaves me poor.
Sweet lover, think of me — I’ve loved you so long!



Sumer is icumen in
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1260 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sing now cuckoo! Sing, cuckoo!
Sing, cuckoo! Sing now cuckoo!

Summer is a-comin'!
Sing loud, cuckoo!
The seed grows,
The meadow blows,
The woods spring up anew.
Sing, cuckoo!

The ewe bleats for her lamb;
The cows contentedly moo;
The bullock roots;
The billy-goat poots …
Sing merrily, cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo,
You sing so well, cuckoo!
Never stop, until you're through!



The Maiden Lay in the Wilds
circa the 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The maiden in the moor lay,
in the moor lay;
seven nights full,
seven nights full,
the maiden in the moor lay,
in the moor lay,
seven nights full and a day.

Sweet was her meat.
But what was her meat?
The primrose and the—
The primrose and the—
Sweet was her meat.
But what was her meat?
The primrose and the violet.

Pure was her drink.
But what was her drink?
The cold waters of the—
The cold waters of the—
Pure was her drink.
But what was her drink?
The cold waters of the well-spring.

Bright was her bower.
But what was her bower?
The red rose and the—
The red rose and the—
Bright was her bower.
But what was her bower?
The red rose and the lily flower.



The World an Illusion
circa 14th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This is the sum of wisdom bright:
however things may appear,
life vanishes like birds in flight;
now it’s here, now there.
Nor are we mighty in our “might”—
now on the bench, now on the bier.
However vigilant or wise,
in health it’s death we fear.
However proud and without peer,
no man’s immune to tragedy.
And though we think all’s solid here,
this world is but a fantasy.

The sun’s course we may claim to know:
arises east, sets in the west;
we know which way earth’s rivers flow,
into the seas that fill and crest.
The winds rush here and there, also,
it rains and snows without arrest.
Will it all end? God only knows,
with the wisdom of the Blessed,
while we on earth remain hard-pressed,
all bedraggled, or too dry,
until we vanish, just a guest:
this world is but a fantasy.



Trust Only Yourself
circa the 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Alas! Deceit lies in trust now,
dubious as Fortune, spinning like a ball,
as brittle when tested as a rotten bough.
He who trusts in trust is ripe for a fall!
Such guile in trust cannot be trusted,
or a man will soon find himself busted.
Therefore, “Be wary of trust!” is my advice.
Trust only yourself and learn to be wise.



See, Here, My Heart
circa the 15th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

O, mankind,
please keep in mind
where Passions start:
there you will find
me wholly kind—
see, here, my heart.



How Death Comes
circa the 13th century
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When my eyes mist
and my ears hiss
and my nose grows cold
as my tongue folds
and my face grows slack
as my lips grow black
and my mouth gapes
as my spit forms lakes
and my hair falls
as my heart stalls
and my hand shake
as my feet quake:
All too late! All too late!
When the bier is at the gate.

Then I shall pass
from bed to floor,
from floor to shroud,
from shroud to bier,
from bier to grave,
the grave closed forever!
Then my house will rest on my nose.
This world’s not worth a farthing, Heaven knows!



Johann Scheffler (1624-1677), also known as Johann Angelus Silesius, was a German Catholic priest and physician, known as a mystic and religious poet. He's a bit later than most of the other poets on this page, but seems to fit in …

Unholy Trinity
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Man has three enemies:
himself, the world, and the devil.
Of these the first is, by far,
the most irresistible evil.

True Wealth
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

There is more to being rich
than merely having;
the wealthiest man can lose
everything not worth saving.

The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The rose merely blossoms
and never asks why:
heedless of her beauty,
careless of every eye.

The Rose
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The rose lack “reasons”
and merely sways with the seasons;
she has no ego
but whoever put on such a show?

Eternal Time
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Eternity is time,
time eternity,
except when we
are determined to "see."

Visions
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Our souls possess two eyes:
one examines time,
the other visions
eternal and sublime.

Godless
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

God is absolute Nothingness
beyond our sense of time and place;
the more we try to grasp Him,
The more He flees from our embrace.

The Source
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Water is pure and clean
when taken at the well-head:
but drink too far from the Source
and you may well end up dead.

Ceaseless Peace
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Unceasingly you seek
life's ceaseless wavelike motion;
I seek perpetual peace, all storms calmed.
Whose is the wiser notion?

Well Written
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Friend, cease!
Abandon all pretense!
You must yourself become
the Writing and the Sense.

Worm Food
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

No worm is buried
so deep within the soil
that God denies it food
as reward for its toil.

Mature Love
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

New love, like a sparkling wine, soon fizzes.
Mature love, calm and serene, abides.

God's Predicament
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

God cannot condemn those with whom he would dwell,
or He would have to join them in hell!

Clods
by Angelus Silesius
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A ruby
is not lovelier
than a dirt clod,
nor an angel
more glorious
than a frog.



The original poem below is based on my teenage misinterpretation of a Latin prayer …

Elegy for a little girl, lost
by Michael R. Burch

… qui laetificat juventutem meam …
She was the joy of my youth,
and now she is gone.
… requiescat in pace …
May she rest in peace.
… amen …
Amen.

I was touched by this Latin prayer, which I discovered in a novel I read as a teenager. I later decided to incorporate it into a poem. From what I now understand, “ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” means “to the God who gives joy to my youth,” but I am sticking with my original interpretation: a lament for a little girl at her funeral. The phrase can be traced back to Saint Jerome's translation of Psalm 42 in the Vulgate Latin Bible (circa 385 AD).

Power holstered on a hip the slang
slips and hisses like a snake,
sharp venom fingers fiddling with handcuffs
he roars like a lion
when confronted with energetic excuses.

soon he will slide
behind turbo charged expressions to keep
the world clean of crims.
what he may add
to this sterile law is a hard fist
of dollar bills taken
from alleyways of shame.
hiya, brother!

we see him steering through
traffic lanes and troubles
enjoying everyone scampering
away from his lordships chariot
winning batmans race.
bring him down to the dust.

all for a chrome plated medal
a starched salute
a piece of paper that sings
of power invested in a holster.

outside of the uniform
he feeds his pet pom
pellets of crunchy biscuits.

Author Notes

Cop.
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved, 7 days ago

- See more at: http://allpoetry.com/poem/11592757-blue-stripes-by-Marshall-Gass#sthash.GhZAMgon.dpuf

It is only a big fool that marries from a matriarchal family
And a heavy-weight duffer marrying from the matriarchal clan
There is always a poisonous cobra, mamba and adder in the matriarchal
Beauty. Snaring like calypso to thrash the callow ridden odyssey in the lover
As it went for the stooges in Kenya blind to the colubrine station falling in love
With daughters, spinsters, wenches, damsels and brunetes of matriarchal heritage
They were swallowed by the inherent colubrine queen at the bottom of matriarchy
It swallowed them all, lawyers, warriors, merchants, politicians, beggars, billionaires,
Lordships of top-notch corporations, gurus of research, legends of foot-ball, din magnates
Negroes, Asians, Britons, Teutonic, Luos, Mulmbe men, Mijikenda and all that had money,
Their kinsmen and tribes now grieve in a song,
Chanting the song of loss in my mother tongue;
Sialile papa!sialile papa! Sicha esirove!
Sialile yaya!sialile yaya! Sicha esirove!
Wanangali wa wabaseve,Niiye wamulile!
Emenyele buli abira! yakhaba mukisumu!
Ese beve! ese beve! ese beve!ese beve!

By-Alexander Opicho
(From Lodwar, Kenya)
Mail-opichoalexander@gmail.com

Zefian; Butler of the greater demon, he would be forced to make the main stained glass window of the Castello del Horcondising, he will continue to put himself on the posts in each hermit tree to recruit from the horsemen lordships of the autumnal massif, towards an eternal wailing of birches in harmony. Pay attention to the words and challenges of presence in the Vernarthian Sub Mythology in Horcondising. Everything will be for the creative principle of a new world, where the materiality that will be useless on the surface, is of value and prosperity ubiquitously in any space where the human race degrades to eternity levels of consciousness.

Biological goal, codes of life, material works beyond a life that reconciles organic life and ethereal life. The evolutionary codes of life go further from the super existence, creating transformations that alternate life in spiritual memory, based on multidimensional spiritual intelligence. The consequence and serial of future ideas or captures of fruitive life,  which will be continued in storage links of gospels of remembrance, to preserve our bio-evolutionary trajectory codes. Super microscopic particles will be decomplexed by Zefián, more withdrawn from the demonicity that is rooted in our faith codes, procreating from there to our filtering mechanics of the dogma of existence, to be applied as perfectible memorization tools, allelomorphic from Tsambika to Horcondising. Creating codes of life and experiences between the creation of God and the creation of the superficial world, in such a way that between both canons, the emergent and fleeting guideline of experience contained in the threshold of death is issued. To go further away from the light itself that does not invade us with diseases correlative to the decomposition and corruptibility of the human born and steely spirit, heading towards an ethereal biological goal. .

Says Leiak: “As the spirit of the Vernarth forest in Horcondising, I have been a multi-parasitic organism in the barks of hyper-spaced oaks, beyond all vanity of large volumes of knowledge and extensions of knowledge. My possible genomes change, each time I blink for a longer time, than the short time I have when resources mutate in such a silent time, which I have been able to measure mathematically. The adaptations of nature to threatening changes also endorse the soul of plants, endowing them with the property of resurrection. The comparative sequences make the evolution of the divine being go beyond the biodegradable sequence, to the point of biological balance of constituting a new life, in the plane of selectivity proper to the particles that carry and attract towards the receptacle of a new life, under the code of a transition from one to one that is reborn in another. Each microscopic element functions as a totalitarian entity in Vernarth submythology, harmoniously linking the chaos and concretion of the world of Genesis with the world of the polytheistic worldview.

Says Borker: “My vaporous voice of the curse, guide that heralds a new one that is leading in Tsambika. Everything bad tends to resurrect in the arms of goodness, where it provides nourishment for those who need to incubate new chains of organic and inorganic adaptability, evangelized and not evangelized, because the light that carries them from the top of the oaks that I pass through the mornings, they always greet me, to proceed like Borker, son of nothing and father of nobody. Here I will be to lead together with Vernarth, the emancipation of the stagnant eco-systemic chains that are stranded in the mud of the administrative power of the supposed super intelligence, which relativizes everything and intervenes. Not knowing that the great super reason by itself recreates itself, making new chaos or riddles, overcome by itself”
Zefián says: “Originally, thousands of cells have been condemned to encompass the density of matter and life on the planet of the experiments called Earth. What is between heaven and earth is in the sub mythology of both poles. Eurydice was in the Orphic world given her romanticism with Orpheus Himself, now she is in our tracóntero, in the mask where she leads the forces between heaven and earth. Right here the Horcondising, which fills us with high associative density. Our populations have to live in the temples of evolutionary austerity and meekness, after events of three-dimensional changes, ours here in Horcondiing has already been mentioned, which is the same as now in Tsambika, for all the parishioners decomposing, but biologically mutating to reborn in a useful life reborn from the seed of sweet death "
  
The Vernarthian sub mythology is the one that perfectly communes with the genesis of the first light and sound, amplifying each other, adapting nobly with the amplitude of momentum exerted, to settle in plans of management of history in thick episodes that have not written by mortal hands in real or fictitious transition which we also conform. Each character that intervenes in the Verthian world ..., here something or someone has complementarity with all the heroes and titans that have existed in our collective memories, making them the anti-heroes or titans that still do not know each other.

Ingratia mol de petal says: “even after being purified, everything must be re-purified; we all owe it to thanks to the constant variability of the notes of the cosmos and its generation. The auras of action surpassed those that add up by thousands of years. I am a liquidator of cancer circles of carcinoma and sainete nodules”

Spermazoid fable is presented to everyone: “Serous plasma runs through the grasslands, before the supra-human count in Horcondising. We are all invisible liquid, that speaks crawling and feeding back its wounds, that do not fit with words that speak further of the rigor of well-being. As a heretical pro, he advanced in the roughness of all the ravines and abandoned reliefs, but when he advanced I do not retreat! I am more vile than time, because time passes and retraces the protozoan memory, moving me away to memories that live and are avant-garde of a mortal, but I have nothing everything. When I have these roughness, I am time and its atomic mass dimension stops time, and attached me to its extermination and nihilistic empty concavity”

Orfilia and Aranhis say while dancing: “a sylph and a naiad appear dressed in white, auguring the feminine aspect of the majesty of the elements. They dance through all the co-rugosities of Verthian sub-mythology, with the support of annulling the hieratic intervention of the spermatozoid fable, for this purpose of relativizing the chromatics of the mythological beings that made a dialogue wheel, peripatetic, even being actors having only audience of those who do not know each other. They dance and dance through all the estuaries and stands of the aristocratic families, who went more than three thousand meters to be judged by themselves, to be redistributed to the chilling of the simile *** bei Hinnom, which is at the top of Horcondising, where all the hallucinating timid flashes of all the re-born flowers of the spring of love whistle fiercely contained in the rosy tones of the Trisolate "

Trisolate: “I am and will be the great conductivity of great energy. Symbolism with a premise today to not think and know words with symbolism of speaking oak barks, where this oak says in itself (I say, later you say), the pronoun must be mutated to the sixth plane, where now we will say or that has never been heard. Only by naming the one that is no longer in the associative language of linguistic clans subject to the sixth pronoun of oaks that live and will live with the code of the language that we have never heard, but starting today if, as a point of reference already bet in the ears of the tree and not the deixis protozoan man! "
  
Vernarth says: “When I try to sleep at night resting my head on the understory of oaks, I sleep painlessly because of the vertebrae that urge to rearrange me, because the roots of his ego on the sixth plane make me consciously independent of the references of my fantasies, It will not be long before my wing comes around the metaphysical corner. Here at the Castello del Horcondising the blocks are not square, they are baldons of the memory of the natural ego, which takes the tram through which my shoes came without clothes that condition it or allow it to express itself tetraplegically handicapped, rather more validated by being trapped by the ghostly essence of oak that is never born or dies, but knowing that it has no Ego”

As tough as ice she might appears, but still carries a melting heart of snow,
the softer side of this warrior Princess is still left for the world to know;

She carries an attitude that may pierce the heart of many suitors,
& for those who are judgmental her words come as battle *******;

Few Casanovas might have survived the attacks of her coquetry and grace,
  for others are still lying unconscious deeply wounded in Hurt’s Embrace;

Although it seems she has evolved as a sagacious damsel, all set for a ****,
still her humility, servitude and feminine art is hidden under a veil;

Her care for the family n kins is exemplary filled with concerns,
& her stand for protecting them is like sunlight shining on golden ferns;

At times she recollects the sweet memories that r close to her heart,
as maturity replaced d sugar-pie of her innocence with a lemon ****;

Although she dresses and dallies like a grown up duchess of shire,
deep inside she’s a still kid longing for a rostrum in this world’s mire;

Her prayers to the lordships are never tinged with selfish material needs,
instead, she beseech only forgiveness & strength for enduring righteous deeds;

We wish her all happiness and warmth she deserves in her life,
may the lord showers her with his choicest blessings that too rife;

Not everyone can see the flame behind the raging mist,
for she has ornamented with gold her mighty fist;

This world has failed to judge the shimmer of those innocent eyes,
for behind those sleepless tears she has arduous dreams yet to arise;

Mistaking her compassion and soft emotions,
many self-made critiques have made faulty notions;

For the most competent may still harbor humility of heart,
& she carries such talents as gifts from the ultimate Mozart;

Time is not far when her chirping would outrun the worldly roars,
for the lordships have heard her forgotten prayers from far shores;

Her inner Faith in almighty’s mercy can move mountains,
& that’s the only currency in his market to open nectar’s fountains;

The proposal of friendship has been sent to her from lord’s side,
& he is awaiting her reciprocations by pursuit of his will to get abide;

For after enlightening her path he expects her to initiate the walk,
& soon his mercy would supply this cuckoo, the wings of a Hawk;

Her grand flight may know no boundaries and walls,
for the divine sky will nurture her endeavors and praise her calls;

We too wanna see her laughter again pouring like a sacred wine,
for its time to drop the curtains and unveil this Covered Sunshine…

If the house where the Lords took a seat
was under a shelter in the park, they would meet
the real situation.
The population unclassed,held fast to the street and who move to the beat of the heart of the city,
it's a pity that those with the clothes made to measure aren't made to take leisure time with the ragged men on the front line.
Indeed ,
ermine robes do not feed the ones who would lead a life such as we'd never know and
the lords never meet the men down on their luck and down on the street,it seems the sword is all rusted and the knot remains tied , to cut it would put someone out
and putting people out is without one single doubt what their lordships are really about.
As they posture it costs you and you pay through the nose,they're wearing Savile Row suits and you're foraging in bins wearing worn out old boots and who knows what comes next
who knows what comes after when you become vexed.
Revolution,
the constitution in crisis
the price of being priceless or worthless is worth less than we're told,
we will get a hold on this
we will kiss this goodbye
we will listen to him
when the speaker cries
order
and then send him away somewhere North of the border,
our swords are being sharpened
the knot will be hewn
and then we will see.

The monolithic columns were beginning to be built that transferred to the transition columns of the period of the 6th century BC. That they would stipulate the fixed number of units of the Doric columns that would be installed towards Vernarth in the transom that would join the crossbars between Mount Profitis and the Iridescent Nimbus, representing a theosophical concept, which when divided into the chromatic ones would materialize, making a commendable incipient epoch of eternal humanity, where the individualities were decompressed from the descendants for more than 500 thousand years in the perspective that would allude to the logos of the Universe, and that very few of their ins and outs were unraveled in the convergences of their diction, before they could be concretized facts that exceed the reality of a theory that is not proven when it is really all consummated. And although everything is the result of a period that will not be reissued again, everything in the Apokálypsis would be of renewal and thoughts with characters of the Factotum interspersed with the forces of the Universe, Elementals and Spirituals that would be teleported in the trans-religious vehicle of Vernarth , with its own intellectual scope that would go back to expressions of philosophical writing but with the grace of the Logos that would redirect itself through vestiges, where there are disquisitions in the claim of Saint John the Apostle referring to that beginning that everything was re-indicated as Genesis was, in which this world has already proven is only the manifestation of a new Universe that would leave the spare one, and would give us the Duoverse full of Light and Hope, vindicating the divine concept in all the voices that were never heard by the fine ear of conception. of the Camera Obscura, where all the voids of the Universe would be engaged in the strengthening of man through super credibility, and d e the support of pre-knowable favors, based on the Logos of hearing everything that is heard, and saying everything that is spoken ..., creating the pronunciation is everything first, and that the word is of significance in what is pronounced in all the processes of withdrawal and insistence that our evidences be resonated, allowing that what remains to be included is the incarnation of a Creator of worlds where no body has been occupied, nor that all the spheres that govern him are in the capacity of the will of empowerment, which is recited in all the multi-evocations, which come from all the well-smelling essences of Cosmic Thought and the Logos of the Monolithic Columns, attracting and magnetizing what “is not thought” to become the verb that resonates in the form of the waves of its creation and of the sense of existence, with the only spiritual spirit that denies all capacity to increase all the plans that have to be made and that are to re-study, under a world that belongs to those who have been humiliated of their will, who have been sullied and who will be liberated in their own exaltation where the words will be lost so that they can later find themselves in the experiment that whips the truth, in the bed of things that swirl in a cosmos that is fed up with being the same and that no one dared to know more than a Peri Kosmous, which of course will give the origin in everything that remained in the accent for those who listened to him hiccuping on the side of a thoughtless tree. Irrational reflections took over the entire heritage of what was the essence of a Christianity that was beginning to be renewed on Patmos, where the experience was those of a very early encounter with the Truth that was a simile of every basis of truth contained in the genome that is woven into the lordships of which it has only the sharpness of facing the self-confidence of the chills, and of the fright when its meaning leaves you speechless.

The muted iridescent leaves the branches of the trees more significant than the cosmic thought itself, which was the light of life in all the voices that cheered him where nothing could find conceptual footholds in the gaze of a sigil of abstract love, only letting the testimony of beings of Light ennoble the capacity of a love that boils with love under every expiration in the darkness itself, as is Wonthelimar full of the flower of Liz that lies in its familiar heraldic. Everything is detachment in the seed that whimsically delivers its fertile axiom in the purity of the layers of the land of Palestine, where thousands of routes of donkeys do not cease to infuse events from the bases of custom and to move where there is no shelter, but there is an illusion that everything happens on Earth and that it is the same gender than itself, almost more eloquent than those who dare to say that everything comes and goes from this earth loaded with Cosmic thought, loaded with inalienable rights where the beneficiaries will be benefited. doubly, and that being a witness to the glory is the same grace that lulls the feeling where everything is Duoversal in a thought that replaces the one that will partially follow the one that comes, for its concepts and true plans where everything and everything will be part of the Prologue of Vernarth in the encounter of a Purgation that utters all the gales of the Meltemi that will pierce all the orchards where they will finally be able to rest on the head of Jakob, and l The fruits of the Faith of Elohim by recidivism will give the world courage by not being afraid of the changes of the foliage, which are from their own repose in the garden that makes them ascend, which abstracts them in the predominance and in the shallow laws of a Occultism that is associated with universal ideas, that puts names and pro-names in powers that are only subtracted with humility in the echoes of personal power, and in what their foliage radiates, that with the piece of a commemorative arrangement of Lilies, now nothing It mattered as a conceptual universalism, without the axial that rusts in the tendency that after its numerals running in different directions or senses, when contemplating itself from a ruler of the cultural word, being intelligence that transverts the dyes of knowledge in the Greek or Hebrew gnosis, that Vernarth or Etréstles could never take back the barge that took them from Sardinia to La Spezia, or that whatever it was like from a sequence shot could be duplicated with the hidden part of a Duoverso, to always have a substitute brother, and that he does not lack when the effect of his occultism is going to emerge in the Aramaic voice that makes the walls of the oropharyngeal trunk creak, with the thought that it makes an elixir of generational life, when the force that It propels a complete involvement, by shaking all the spheres that were anodyne with a new gesture in a dawn of Eternal life.

The category of anodyne value is that what collides with the solid elements what could be in the new essence of an elemental rebirth, and of occultism that only transgresses the ideas that are proper to those who rectify a greater degree of physical forces than move the world for the minors who sustain the microcosm, before a micro thought that was sometimes more contemplative, of what its inheritance as a software perfects, and that has to be descended in its hereditary integrity as "Inheritance", devoid of any individuality that makes an omen the real estate of the anhistorical sense, perpetuating the anhistoricism that refers to a denial of the relationship with history, in the historical advance or the custom, such as the frequent criticism that the facts reveal a nuance of weakness Where would Alexander the Great's record change, if he had been protected by Vernarth before he was consumed by malaria, or had been abused by his own commanders? They have a trophy of a fever that offends further from everything that is ignored if it is not a real argument, and may have lived many more than the same context of knowing or ignoring what happened, that is why their anhistoric polytheistic-social will describe the vision more adjective of who detaches himself from his history, and repairs in history itself the secondary planes where only a submitological discourse would take him to the source of the timeless Macedonian seat.

" Please, Highest-Ranking Lord of Lords we do beg of You, don't You shove
our beloved opera singer into the cold, cold ground, ****** "....


...And, the ancient, blue moon that mystically lives high above the bar is slightly less intoxicated
than ourselves, but, we will not turn off the lights,
until it gets light again, or maybe not at all,
because such an artificial light
in our o, so befuddled eyes has something
quite beautiful about it we think,
especially if you are close friends who're a bit totally drunk
as an almost comic or- believe it or not-  a completely absurd duo of displaced persons like you and I,
or as a collection of very old, dusty barrel organs even,
that turn out to be way more toneless than
the almost dead opera singer at the end of the bar,
who was so called apprenticed to none other than
the great Caruso himself, although we still do realize that an unrealistic amount of vile lies can be sown everywhere in this country
(even by us, drinkers)


And, coincidence or not, the music
in our favorite local bar comes out of
an old scratchy vinyl record by the very same Caruso,
as it would drive out any culture barbarian,
just like we ourselves are eager to chase out
all of those witnesses of Jeovah with a big broom whenever they show up at our front doors,
although, we may be dumb
but not barbarians of culture, because listen,
that Caruso, well, that man, he does de facto sing better than a caged nightingale, when you hear him spread
his colorful wings in every note, in all those well- formed octaves,
in every masterfully perfomed song even,
although, his opera art can sometimes make us
so sleep drunk and that might be a nice feeling at times, but, it is at the same time one of those cliches
that you shouldn't try at home, kids!


Leave that to mature lordships like ourselves,
whom you tend to call scornfully, old men,
and, meanwhile please, let us have our love for music, and, if you would be so good, don't make
those painful jokes about our heartfelt weakness
for good old opera tunes...

Yes, we are the ones who truly do believe Caruso
was here....and if you don't believe this true story
then, come back tomorrow same time
when we'll be a little sober again
as well as ready to tell you a next white lie
as that's at least what you disrespectful people
from Mars think about it,
but, I say, just you read our drunken lips :


"******, to hell, because you are all a bunch
of ******* liars", as our beloved Caruso
is still alive ( and, we just bought him
a very special Italian beer) after which he probably will start singing vividly
as a classy and uttermost captivating nightingale......because the alleged, so called apprentice of the Master in our local bar
turned out to be none other than
the divine (Grand)Master Caruso himself...



- Salute!     Cheers !