Melancholy and vanity.
After Melancholy, Domenico Fetti (1620)
Woe is me! A skull so says, as a hark,
a black tear cresting, resting bleak
echoing, a lamenting dark cloak,
like a sour breast, a mocked heart’s bough,
weathered, like a hunched and glum elm.
Incumbently redundant plane!
Stuck, as bittering bees-stuff, thick,
bound in shadow-sent shackles, bent;
sharp as a tear-trickle, laboured, truly!