I came cross this poem in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems in the English Language, a marvellous 963-page book that I bought in Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in Saint Paul and return to again and again. The poems are accompanied by Bloom’s thoughts on each poet, and his judgements are often severe. He has “not much esteem…for Pound, whether as a person or poet.” His entry on Pound has nine pages of mostly dismissive criticism and only one poem, a translation.

A planh is a genre of the Troubadours, a funeral lament for “a great personage, a protector, a friend or relative, or a lady.” A planh usually includes an expression of grief, praise of the dead person, and prayer for his or her soul.

Henry Plantagenet  (1155-1183) was the eldest son of Henry II and the older brother of Richard 1, Richard Cœur de Lion. As a child I associated myself with Richard, mainly because he had the same name as me (although I lacked the Lionheart suffix) but partly because the other two king Richards seemed impossible to admire and because I was obsessed with plastic models of knights on horseback. But I either never knew or had completely forgotten that Richard the Lionheart had an older brother who had in some sense been king, although he doesn’t feature in the line of English kings. In 1170 he was crowned King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and Maine. But his father was the real king, and Henry died six months before Henry, allowing Richard to become king.

Bertran de Born (born in the 1140s and certainly dead by 1205) , Wikipedia tells me, “was a baron from the Limousin in France, and one of the major Occitan troubadours of the 12th-13th century. He composed love songs (cansos) but was better known for his political songs (sirventes). He was involved in revolts against Richard I and then Phillip II. He married twice and had five children. In his final years, he became a monk.”

The poem speaks to me not because of its association with Henry the Young King but because of its powerful evocation of grief, speaking to me of a private grief:

If all the grief and woe and bitterness,
All dolour, ill and every evil chance
That ever came upon this grieving world
Were set together they would seem but light
Against….[insert your cause of grief]

Planh for the Young English King by Bertrans de Born. Translated from the Provençal by Ezra Pound

If all the grief and woe and bitterness,
All dolour, ill and every evil chance
That ever came upon this grieving world
Were set together they would seem but light
Against the death of the young English King.
Worth lieth riven and Youth dolorous,
The world overshadowed, soiled and overcast,
Void of all joy and full of ire and sadness.

Grieving and sad and full of bitterness
Are left in teen the liegemen courteous,
The joglars supple and the troubadours.
O’er much hath ta’en Sir Death that deadly warrior
In taking from them the young English King,
Who made the freest hand seem covetous.
‘Las! Never was nor will be in this world
The balance for this loss in ire and sadness!

O skilful Death and full of bitterness,
Well mayst thou boast that thou the best chevalier
That any folk e’er had, hast from us taken;
Sith nothing is that unto worth pertaineth
But had its life in the young English King
And better were it, should God grant his pleasure,
That he should live than many a living dastard
That doth but wound the good with ire and sadness.

From this faint world, how full of bitterness
Love takes his way and holds his joy deceitful
Sith no thing is but turneth unto anguish
And each to-day Vails less than yestere’en,
Let each man visage this young English King
That was most valiant ‘mid all worthiest men!
Gone is his body fine and amorous,
Whence have we grief, discord and deepest sadness.

Him, whom it pleased for our great bitterness
To come to earth to draw us from misventure,
Who drank of death for our salvacioun,
Him do we pray as to a Lord most righteous
And humble eke, that the young English King
He please to pardon, as true pardon is,
And bid go in with honoured companions
There where there is no grief, nor shall be sadness.