Translation
No, we were never introduced, Yet she and I were long acquainted. I know all her ways and all The tunes this pale usurper sings To those she has seduced Beneath the blanching mays And left, like her, demented. So eminently natural That even nature must defer Before her instinct to conserve, In leopard shoes and silver rings The maenad roves out now To see into the life of things And sow her poison at the root, To claim the earth, to claim the air, To rid the world of witnesses Until, in her divine enclosure, She alone is there. No, we were never introduced. What purpose could I serve? I am no one she’d remember, Being the merest subject, left – Far more than I deserve - To wander in her private grove Until her work was done. Now, in the aftermath of love, The world is all December: This is trespass: I must go, And may the heartless, witless Creature neither care nor know.
A re-casting of A E Housman