She sang : The owl , they say , was a baker's daughter
but what she did not then overtly sing
was simply I have got a bun in the oven.
The import of her semi - ribald lays
Pointed the detail of the court's corruption.
but innate youthful wisdom had been chained
too long for a patriarch's acknowledgment .
All those favours from the callous prince in black
she had returned at her foolish father's prompting
but her lover in turn had sent them back again
with an ironic further favour : her father's death .
What then was her spoiled innocence to do ?
No mother to advise , a brother too close at home
returned to court to assert the rights of males
as constrictive to her as had been her father's bidding ;
her lover no longer with her for support
and even his advice denied her now.
With neither kind of nunnery an option
then could she turn to rue to help abort ?
And so she asserted her own prerogative :
the simple right of to be or not to be .
no use of a bare bodkin , but the softer death
still made her statement against a harsher world
as the willows on the gently flowing stream,
closed weeping curtains round her and her dream.