Translate Your Poem Into Plain Modern English

You are staring at a poem full of inverted syntax and words nobody uses any more, trying to work out what it is actually saying before you can even decide if you like it. This gives you a line by line plain English version, plus notes on the genuinely ambiguous bits.

Take the poem I paste below, which uses archaic, ornate or deliberately obscure language, and produce a plain modern English translation that preserves the meaning and emotional weight of each line without trying to preserve rhyme or metre. Work line by line rather than paraphrasing the whole poem loosely. After the translation, note any lines where meaning was genuinely ambiguous in the original and explain the choice made. Poem: {POEM_TEXT}