Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree’s shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;
Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,
And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;
And, though ’twas a step into which he had driven her,
He somehow or other had never forgiven her;
Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,
Something bitter to chew when he’d play the Byronic, 10
And I can’t count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over
By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her. 
‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;
’When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, as she thought—­but (ah, how Fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,—­
You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it. 
Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress! 
What romance would be left?—­who can flatter or kiss trees? 20
And, for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue
With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,—­
Not to say that the thought would forever intrude
That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood? 
Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,
To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;
Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,
As they left me forever, each making its bough! 
If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was right,
Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’ 30

Now, Daphne—­before she was happily treeified—­
Over all other blossoms the lily had deified,
And when she expected the god on a visit
(’Twas before he had made his intentions explicit),
Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,
To look as if artlessly twined in her hair,
Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,
Like the day breaking through, the long night of her tresses;
So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,
Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table 40
(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,
Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),—­
He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it,
As I shall at the——­, when they cut up my book in it.

Well, here, after all the bad rhyme I’ve been spinning,
I’ve got back at last to my story’s beginning: 
Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,
As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,
Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,
We read of his verses—­the Oracles, namely,—­ 50
(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely,
For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,