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I.
Under the lime trees
I lay my love down
Under the lime trees I lay her
And when she rose up
Her mouth was so red
Sweeter than figs,
Her mouth, so red.
Tan-dara-dara-dei
Tan-dara-dei.
I am the Knave of Dreams. They smote the floor with a stalk of spiderwort and up I sprang, purple and green and all over sweet-smelling, and they tangled me up with bells and bade me dance.
I am happy to dan
ce. The floor of my birth is spangled in stars, painted gold, painted carnelian, painted azure and orange and black, and my feet upon it are light as wort-roots. I am a heart full of foliage—nothing in me is not flower, stamen, thorn, pistil, blossom, blossom, rose. I am a fool, and I am a knight, and my horse is hawthorne and hyssop. I gallop; I canter. They laugh at my silken shoes and sword of campion and rue.
But I see the queen with her girdle of roses—the roses whisper scarlet and white, of where her hips last thrust and blushed, of how her hair whipped linen. I see the best of the knights with his plume of crocus—the crocus murmurs yellow and violet, of how he keeps his eyes open when he kisses her.
I see, I see, and I sing, and snowdrops fall out of my mouth. But I sing of my love and my sweetheart and my kisses full tender—always mine, never theirs—and they think I do not see how their cups flame from the touch of two such burning mouths. But after all, it was a court, it was a starry floor where silk-haired apes danced and wrestled—and such things will happen among apes. Their dance was never a secret, never as high-flown a trespass as lesser poets than I would claim, just so that their verses could scan.
I looked on the queen, too. I marked her honeycomb-hair and her thimble-bright eyes. Like all men my velvets tightened—a fool still owns his blood!—but I sang and sang, and came not near.
Tan-dara-dei.
II.
She came a-walking through the violets
And how did she call to me?
With honeysuckle and meadowsweet and bryony.
Tan-dara-dara-dei.
She made a place in the wheat for me
and what did she show me there?
Willow whips and strawberry leaves
and fingers clasped in prayer.
Tan-dara-dei.
There was a girl made of flowers, too—the floor was fertile that year. She came up with her black hair all strung with foxglove, and her toes were ringed in coltsfoot. I loved her, I did, but flower calls to flower. She did not sing; I sang for us both. On each of her berry-brown toes was an ivory bell, and I shook them like lilies-of-the-valley, and with buttercups in her eyelashes she laughed like a thrush. The others played at cards which turned up a king, a queen, with lances leaning in, but we played our fools’ dice, and were troubled by no dour high-born faces.
Come, Dagonet! Give us a song! Come, Dagonet, show us how you fought a dragon with both hands tied and hopping on one foot!
Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired tonight, and the wine is in my head like a copper tub sloshing over.
