Strambotti

For Frank Prince

What feelings might encapsulate a soul

Or render into verse some scrap of sense?

Remembering love was your own cherished goal,

But you and she have both departed hence.

How should the dead return to speak in tongues?

It does no good, if good there be to make.

Music forgotten sets forgotten songs.

The waiting dreamer gives himself a shake.

I’m with you there, in what you felt that day.

I'll seek to speak—if something’s left to say.

***

I now exist, as you once did before.

We neither chose to run the rapids here

Or were consulted at the open door.

An end approaches, be it far or near.

This estrabot to deny might serve

What doom awaiting at the coming swerve?

What nonsense, though, to make a final wish!

Life’s not a meal in which dessert’s a dish.

Cf. F. T. Prince, The Doors of Stone: Poems 1938–1962 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), "Strambotti," I–XVII.

This verse form became popular in the fifteenth century in Italy, where Sir Thomas Wyatt discovered it, who introduced it in England. The word strambotto derives from the Occitan (Provençal) term estrabot.