| The Rattlebag | |
| As I was (easiest praise) | |
| one day of summer | |
| under trees between mountain and field | |
| 4 | awaiting my soft-spoken girl, |
| she came (it's worthless to deny) | |
| to where she had promised, an undeniable moon. | |
| We sat together (splendid topic, | |
| 8 | a hesitant thing), the girl and I; |
| I exchanged (before a claim should fail) | |
| words with an excellent girl. | |
| And as we were thus (she was modest) | |
| 12 | the two of us understanding love, |
| there came (a feebleness bereft of [good] nurturing) | |
| with a cry (some stinking feat) | |
| a small ugly noisy (the bottom of a sack [making] a sound) | |
| 16 | creature in the guise of a shepherd. |
| And he had (hateful declaration) | |
| a rattle-bag, angry, with a whithered cheek [and] harsh-horned. | |
| He sounded (yellow-bellied lodger) | |
| 20 | the rattlebag; woe to the scabby leg! |
| And then without gaining satisfaction | |
| the fair girl was frightened, woe me! | |
| When she heard (breast made brittle by a wound) | |
| 24 | the winnowing of the stones, she would stay no more. |
| Under Christ, there was never a sound in Christendom | |
| (a sow's fame) as harsh: | |
| a bag sounding on the end of a stick, | |
| 28 | a bell's sound of small stones and gravel; |
| a shaking vessel of English stones making a sound | |
| in a bullock's skin; | |
| a basket of three thousand beetles, | |
| 32 | a surging cauldron, a black bag; |
| guardian of a meadow, cohabitor of grass, | |
| black-skinned [and] pregnant with dry wood-chips. | |
| It's voice [is] hateful for an old roebuck, | |
| 36 | a devil of a bell, with a pole in its crotch. |
| A scarred scab with a stone-bearing gravel-womb, | |
| may it be buckle-laces. | |
| [May] coldness be on the shapeless churl, | |
| 40 | (amen) who frightened my girl. |