The Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes)

by James Branch Cabell

  BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER

  "_A curious preference for the artificial should be mentioned ascharacteristic of ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI'S poetry. For his century wasanything but artless; the great commonplaces that form the main stockof human thought were no longer in their first flush, and he addresseda people no longer childish. . . . Unquestionably his fancies werefantastic, anti-natural, bordering on hallucination, and they betray adesire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to prefer them tothe sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that embroider with oldfaded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite, trivial andidiotically sentimental patterns._"

  Let me have dames and damsels richly clad To feed and tend my mirth, Singing by day and night to make me glad;

  Let me have fruitful gardens of great girth Fill'd with the strife of birds, With water-springs, and beasts that house i' the earth.

  Let me seem Solomon for lore of words, Samson for strength, for beauty Absalom.

  Knights as my serfs be given; And as I will, let music go and come; Till, when I will, I will to enter Heaven.

  ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI.--_Madrigal, from D. G. Rossetti's version_.