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Dare he deny his verses to
thee
Any poet, skylark sweet?
As for me, I dare not I:
I would make your warble famed
Over all birds that are caged
And all that in the forest lie.
How good it does you to hear,
at the hour
That the fields are worked by the plowman,
When the earth Spring is foretelling,
Which still more of your song is aswoon
Than incenséd by the wound
Of the plowshare, that rends its belly!
As soon as you have watered
you
At the break of day, in dew,
You make in the air a thousand discourses;
In the air you shake your wings
And babble in the sky of things
And tell unto the wind your amours.
Then from the sky you fall
away
Into a green furrow, be it to lay,
Be it to hatch or brood there firm,
Be it to carry a beakful to
Your little ones, an earthworm who
Consume, or caterpillar, or a worm.
Now I, upon the short grass
here,
Partly your little song I hear;
Partly, on some pennyroyal,
Underneath a sheltering fern,
I hearken the young shepherdess
Spouting her tirralirraloy.
Now I say, “How happy
thou art,
Goodly amorous skylark,
That hast nor fear nor care of aught,
That ne’er hast felt at heart the pain
Of a sweet friend’s proud disdain,
Nor the need to earn what’s bought.
“Or if e’er some
care touch you,
It is, when the sundown’s through,
Of sleeping and awakening
With your songs, in the sunrise,
Shepherds and eke passersby
To send them all away a-working.
“But I live evermore in
sadness
For the despite of a mistress
Who pays me for my troth with laboring
And withal a plaisaunt flout,
A flout that ever stretches out
The weft of all my ills so lengthy.”
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