Childhood Friends
His sweetheart's tiny linnet with seed,
Will none the less look askance at the stork.
When love goes to sleep, our souls first move
To strains of deep feeling that will not pass.
Is a mother not more than a toying lass?
But the child she holds is the corpse of love.
On the mount of the gods, where in vain their liege is
Opposing to time his broken ægis,
With gray-haired Bacchus near by, we see
In never-changing stupidity
Fat Venus, who sits like a country girl
As she fastens a ribbon around a curl.
I furthermore count as a grievous fault
That blondest of hair which she thus attires.
She never glows, she only perspires;
For blondes are as bread that is baked without salt,
And their table-talk is inept and stale.
Then black hair, too, conceals without fail
A faithless lust for daggers and death;
And no dream could portray under bridal wreath
The hair that God gave the horse for his tail.
But soft chestnut-brown, where the sun-beams dapple.
Whose tints with the tones of Correggio strive,
To such, O Iduna, I give thine apple,
That's the hair to bewitch any man alive.
In brief, on dazzling shoulders hangs
The blondest hair ever curled in bangs,
Or twined with gold and sent for a drive.
She pats on the cheek the first groom she meets
Will none the less look askance at the stork.
When love goes to sleep, our souls first move
To strains of deep feeling that will not pass.
Is a mother not more than a toying lass?
But the child she holds is the corpse of love.
On the mount of the gods, where in vain their liege is
Opposing to time his broken ægis,
With gray-haired Bacchus near by, we see
In never-changing stupidity
Fat Venus, who sits like a country girl
As she fastens a ribbon around a curl.
I furthermore count as a grievous fault
That blondest of hair which she thus attires.
She never glows, she only perspires;
For blondes are as bread that is baked without salt,
And their table-talk is inept and stale.
Then black hair, too, conceals without fail
A faithless lust for daggers and death;
And no dream could portray under bridal wreath
The hair that God gave the horse for his tail.
But soft chestnut-brown, where the sun-beams dapple.
Whose tints with the tones of Correggio strive,
To such, O Iduna, I give thine apple,
That's the hair to bewitch any man alive.
In brief, on dazzling shoulders hangs
The blondest hair ever curled in bangs,
Or twined with gold and sent for a drive.
She pats on the cheek the first groom she meets
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