RAINUV: A ROMANTIC BALLAD FROM THE EARLY BASQUE

... so then naturally

This Count Rainuv I speak of

(Certainly I did not expect you would ever have heard of him;

You are American poets, aren't you?

That's rather awful ... I am the only American poet

I could ever tolerate ... well, sniff and pass....)

Therefore ... well, I knew Rainuv.

(My P. G. course at Penn, you'll remember;

A little Anglo-Saxon and Basuto,

But Provencal, mostly. Most don't go in for that....

You haven't, of course ... What, no Provencal?

Well, of course, I know

Rather more than you do. That's my specialty.

But then—Omnis Gallia est divisa—but no matter.

Not fit, perhaps you'd say, that, to be quoted

Before ladies.... That's your rather amusing prudishness....)

Well, this Rainuv, then,

A person with a squint like a flash

Of square fishes ... being rather worse than most

Of the usual literati

Said, being carried off by desire of boasting

That he knew all the mid-Victorians

Et ab lor bos amics:

(He thought it was something to boast of.)

We'll say he said he smoked with Tennyson,

And—deeper pit—pax vobiscum—went to vespers

With Adelaide Anne Procter; helped Bob Browning elope

With Elizabeth and her lapdog (said it bit him)

Said he was the first man Blake told

All about the angels in a pear-tree at Peckham Rye

Blake drew them for him, he said; they were grackles, not angels—

(Blake's not a mid-Victorian, but you don't know better)

So ... we come, being slightly irritated, to facing him down.

"... And George Eliot?" we ask lightly.

"Roomed with him," nodded Rainuv confidently,

"At college!"... Ah, bos amic! bos amic!

Rainuv is a king to you....

Three centuries from now (you dead and messy) men whispering insolently

(Eeni meeni mini mo...) will boast that their great-grand-uncles

Were kicked by me in passing....

Margaret Widdemer

(Clutching a non-existent portière with one hand.)