The Wife of Bath on Sugawara no Michizane
Years and years and years (and years!) ago, I traveled to Atlantia's Kingdom Arts and Sciences Faire and participated in the Duke Gyrth Memorial Smackdown, at which I had indecent amounts of fun. My "assigment" was to assume the identity and style of the Wife of Bath, and praise or destroy two other assigned poets of literary figures. One of my assigned targets was Joan of Arc. So here, in somethig approaching Chaucerian heroic couplets, is what the Wife of Bath thinks of Sugawara no Michizane.
Sugawara no Michizane-san,
I think I've never seen a better man!
Though I have seen and loved and married five
good English lords, e'en were they still alive,
your smooth nobility, your learned pen
would put to shame a hundred English men.
You've such a way with tongues - good gracious me! -
a brilliant mind like yours can surely see
how easy it will be to make me come
to understand my heart 'till now was numb.
Sugawara no Michizane-chan,
I'm widowed now. I do not think I can
go on alone without your honeyed verse,
both elegant and brief - it could be worse!
I love your courtly robes, your wispy beard,
and 'till you came along, I really feared
some yapping bore would whisk me off to wed,
who'd make more noise at dinner than in bed.
But you, my lord, can paint exotic lands
in sounds swift as the brush moves in your hands.
And I'll throw songs at you like lovesick birds
'till I posses you body, soul and words.