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Chapter 21: THE WHITE STAG

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About This Book

A compact sequence of lyrics and narrative poems reimagines medieval troubadour and classical voices through a modernist lens. The collection mixes stylized adaptations and persona pieces, ranging from jaunty ballads to mournful elegies, and tests forms such as sestina, sonnet, and canzone. Themes of love, loss, memory, exile, and the craft of song recur amid dense, allusive imagery. Shifts in diction and perspective create a chorus of historical and mythic echoes, prioritizing formal experimentation and vocal variety over linear narrative while inviting attentive, cross-temporal reading.

THE WHITE STAG

I HA’ seen them mid the clouds on the heather.

Lo! they pause not for love nor for sorrow,

Yet their eyes are as the eyes of a maid to her lover,

When the white hart breaks his cover

And the white wind breaks the morn.

“’Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting,

Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!”

PICCADILLY

BEAUTIFUL, tragical faces,

Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;

And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,

That are so sodden and drunken,

Who hath forgotten you?

O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!

The gross, the coarse, the brazen,

God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,

But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,

Who hath forgotten you?