BUCOLIC COMEDY: PLATITUDES by EDITH SITWELL

THE news of Queen Anne's death comes to arouse
The Dead, in the quilted red satin house

Where the country gentlemen from their birth
Like kind red strawberries root in earth.

Then weeping come the dairy girls
With their ivy curls and their cheeks like pearls;

They leave the cheese and they leave the milk
That Pan will steal -- it is white as silk.

Peruked waves curl and break a splinter
From the flat pearled shore of winter;

And candle-flames bob like strawberries low
Over the thick and the cream-like snow;

While the dairy girls weep; "Who cares," they said,
"If old and cross Queen Anne be dead?"

They wept, "She lies in her palace chamber
Embalmed in the cold, like a wasp in amber,

While a fawning courtier-like air roves
In among the dark shadow-groves. . . .

And dead is our faun who loved the sheen
Of the snow that is cold as a nectarine!"

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