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Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 20: FILLE-LA-HAINE.
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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

FILLE-LA-HAINE.

Death went into the steeple to ring,
And he pulled the rope and he tolled a knell.
Fille-la-Haine, how well you sing!
Why are they ringing the Passing Bell?
Death went into the steeple to ring;
Fille-la-Haine, how well you sing!
Death went down the stream in a boat,
Down the river of Seine went he;
Fille-la-Haine had a pain in her throat,
Fille-la-Haine was nothing to me.
Death went down the stream in a boat;
Fille-la-Haine had a pain in her throat.
Death went up the hill in a cart
(I have forgotten her lips and her laughter).
Fille-la-Haine was my sweetheart
(And all the village was following after).
Death went up the hill in a cart;
Fille-la-Haine was my sweetheart.