COLIN MUSSET, AN OLD POET,
COMPLAINS TO HIS PATRON
From the Old French
I’m getting old in your big house, and you’ve never stretched your hand with a bit of gold to me, or a day’s wages itself. By my faith in Mary, it’s not that way I’ll serve you always, living on my pocket, with a few coppers only, and a small weight in my bag. You’ve had me to this day, singing on your stairs before you, but I’m getting a good mind to be going off, when I see my purse flattened out, and my wife does be making a fool of me from the edge of the door.
It’s another story I hear when I come home at night and herself looks behind me, and sets her eye on my bag stuffed to bursting, and I maybe with a grey, decent coat on my back. It’s that time she’s not long leaving down her spinning and coming with a smile, ready to choke me with her two hands squeezing my neck. It’s then my sons have a great rage to be rubbing the sweat from my horse, and my daughter isn’t long wringing the necks on a pair of chickens, and making a stew in the pot. It’s that day my youngest will bring me a towel, and she with nice manners.... It’s a full purse, I tell you, makes a man lord in his own house.
WALTER VON DER
VOGELWEIDE
I never set my two eyes on a head was so fine as your head, but I’d no way to be looking down into your heart.
It’s for that I was tricked out and out—that was the thanks I got for being so steady in my love.
I tell you, if I could have laid my hands on the whole set of the stars, the moon and the sun along with it, by Christ I’d have given the lot to her. No place have I set eyes on the like of her; she’s bad to her friends, and gay and playful with those she’d have a right to hate. I ask you can that behaviour have a good end come to it?
LEOPARDI
SILVIA
Are you bearing in mind that time when there was a fine look out of your eyes, and yourself, pleased and thoughtful, were going up the boundaries that are set to childhood? That time the quiet rooms, and the lanes about the house, would be noisy with your songs that were never tired out; the time you’d be sitting down with some work that is right for women, and well pleased with the hazy coming times you were looking out at in your own mind.