'A Practical Problem Concerning Flies' (1820)

So as you can see from the last few posts, I have been working, in a more or less desultory way, through those Latin poems attributed to Coleridge in J C C Mays' Poetical Works, to see which were actually by him. But I think the best thing to do with this is not drip-feed it out in an interminable series of dull individual posts, but rather to bundle it all into one super-long bulletin, and so dispose of it. Meanwhile, I thought I'd pause over one Latin poem that Coleridge definitely did write himself, a four line squib introduced in the relevant Notebook entry [CN 4:4710] as 'A Grave Problem', but printed by Mays [as poem 570: 1.2:991] under the title given at the top of this post. Coleridge wonders 'whether the advantage of the transmutation of waste matter into flies is equaled by the excretions and extrusions of those same flies'. Then there's the poem:

Sit alba, sit fusca
(Ni res est absurda)
Quod fuit Merda in Muscă
Jacet Merda in Merdà

Mays translates as 'Be it white or be it black/(Unless it's absurd)/What was dung on the fly/Lies as turd on turd.' 'Fuscus' ‎('dark, swarthy, dusky') is liable to make us think of the dark-coloured academic dress code known as 'subfusc', which in turn makes me wonder if we could go with:

Whether white or black-tie
(Howsoever absurd)
What was shit in the fly
Lies as turd in-turd

The Notebook entry makes the 'interred' joke plainer: the practical problem is one 'suggested by the Grave Problem', whether a breed of flies might be raised capable of 'performing burial-service'. But maybe 'black-tie' is too much of a stretch. And maybe it's a shame to lose sight of the fact that Coleridge uses the same word, 'merda', three times in the last two lines. At least the following would maintain the internal rhyme:

Whether white or dark dye
(Howsoever absurd)
What was merde in the fly
Lies as turd in-turd

Or maybe:

Whether white or dark dye
(Howsoever absurd)
What was merde in the fly
Lies as merde im-mured

Tricky to bring it off, actually.