Hope floats but I, love spurned, elect to drown!
So hold me…pond-weed and driftwood bramble,
While reeds serve to tangle and keep me bound,
Carried 'long o'er course of river's restless ramble.
For I would listen, in lieu, to water-lily's white lies,  
Rather than lover's words, once of sweetest breath composed,
Turned venomous; in deceit he speaks: Get thee to a nunnery!
Alas! That I should live to see such a loveless sunrise…
Too cruel a fate to contemplate; so away, to watery repose!
Oh piety! Oh chastity! These things that I did save for thee!

Hope survives but I, love-lost, have chosen instead to die!
No more, for me, any of these: sweetly-scented rosemary
Neither fennel fragrant nor comely curling columbines;
Not even, for me, a stray unpresumptuous daisy!
No flowers shall be lain upon my watery grave,
For I relinquish my virginity to the lily pad's indemnity
No more can I abide this senselessness and gloom!
No more care have I for virtue to sanctify or save,
For he has assumed bawdiness an aspect of my beauty,
And thus these waters have been turned into my tomb!


And if he mourns? I shall believe it a thin disguise,
For what must be the most callous of madness!
Would he, himself, suffer to fall from desired to despised?
Would he, himself, not be made victim of such sadness?
And thus, when I rise to through the veil to the surface,
Ask you not, fools, the question hovering in the air:
She, who was but a child!  Why, you lament, oh, why?  
For my life, as it were, would run on without purpose
And thus I chose to dissipate into the summer air:
For hope floats but I, betrayed, was better off to die.

Sylphs suspended in oil-slick skies
Slipping diamond rings onto
Night's amorphous hand;

Until, in the embrace of an
Ink and ashen eve,
They chance
To fall

While we chance to dream.