Seattle Small Books Company

On Ancient Paths

My mistress’ sparrow is dead,

The sparrow, my mistress’ delight,

Whom she loved more than her own eyes—

For he was sweet as honey and he knew her

As well as a girl her mother;

Nor did he move himself from her lap.

But hopping now here, now there,

He constantly chirped to his mistress alone:

He who now goes through the way of darkness

Through that place from which everyone

Is denied return.

Let there be evil on you,

Evil shadow of Orcus,

You who devour all pretty things:

For you have carried my beautiful sparrow from me.

O evil deed! O pitiful sparrow.

Now your deeds redden my mistress’ swollen eyes.

I cannot resist a few lines (of 680) of Skelton’s verse:

Whan I remember again

How my Philip was slain,

Never half the pain

Was between you twain,

Pyramus and Thisbe,

As than befell to me.

I wept and wailed,

The tears down hailed;

But nothing it availed

To call Philip again,

Whom Gib, our cat, hath slain.

Gib, I say, our cat,

Worrowed her on that

Which I loved best.

It cannot be express’d

My sorrowful heaviness,

But all without redress;

All this to show the Fibonacci character of literature, as Borges and Barth have pointed out so well.

l.76: to tame

l.79: Milton, “Paradise Lost.”

l. 80: “The Sea Wolf,” paraphrasing Wolf Larson.

l. 81: from first part of Goethe’s Faust

l. 88: Synchysis --A derangement or confusion of any kind, as of words in a sentence.

l. 88: from Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen."