My last duchess scrambled

Look, my name and my skill yet ranked flush with my lady’s white smile.  Like a fool, I had hope and yet she was not mine.  All ladies are alike. I shall clear mine away and be done with her presence.  Begone!  

I have learned my lesson.  Officious though it may be, look, I am busily starting again.  A new wife.  I am drawn to her smile like fruit flies to cherries.  ‘Sir’, she called me, and I had hope that my munificence would elicit joy.  Although since starting, I must admit, and she worked her smile to please, my happiness was disallowed, and such smiling never quite hit the spot.  She could not meet my eyes.

Her face, though fair, came alive in the laps of others.  She stands as easily as she rides, and is impressed by whatever gifts are bestowed.  I thanked the duchess and I thought I made myself glance up smiling.  I am pleased and never save the thanks from speech. Such times together were a rarity, a gift.  Oh just presence please stoop to ask if such truth disgusts.  In speech, I am avowed, I draw my will thus; the blame was entirely mine, despite the Duchess’s courtesy.  

Although my name is nine-hundred years old, I am as a child.  I sit contemplating Adolf’s worst excesses.  The pictures of Innsbruck stopping my heart in my breast.  I wandered around the terrace all one afternoon, trying to tame the fears and passions rising up in my throat.  I durst not speak my thought.  But I choose to make a clean breast of it.  My hands did the work.  I wrote this piece, though it makes me blush that I could not before.  I added a clause to my will: a codicil, I repeat my desires.  

Glad was the day I broke cover.  A warrant giving notice for my arrest.  I faint, but the wall offers no favour.  I squat, half-mast, soon to be cast out, without the least excuse, an iron bracelet locking my wrist.  I cast a glance to the orchard, alive but the scaffold stands ever proud, as the curtain on my life.  I stop and ask. ‘Sir, t’was it I?’  ‘T’was ever thus!’, came the reply.