Dark backward and abysm

An old friend asked if I remembered a couplet from a court masque that I wrote in (gulp) 1973. He thought of the lines before I did--it was his song--but I found myself singing another. This was for a Brythonic warrior, woad-streaked: his part was Raw Courage.

Orion wears a coat of sparks
And starry galligaskins
But men may see what man I be
Without my first dismasking

Caesar and his clangy rout
Came o’er the Thames’s margent
I blued my cheeks and cracked their breeks
As they were whelks of argent

Now William and his swaddling band
Of knitted knights came paddling
I slit their scales from gills to tails
And roasted them like codlings

Some died for vermeil Lancaster
Or the blanchéd rose of York
I went in fine as a sops-in-wine
And ‘scaped the potting fork

O fashion is a wanton sport
A nuisance without numbria
But a Briton fights in seamless tights
Completely unencumbria.

Silly stuff--but by Toutatis! I remembered it.

Nine