The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [91]
Where his cattle meditate and his sheep quietly graze;
Who keeps warm in winter with a wool doublet
Twice dipped in home dye;
Who eats the bread he baked from corn he milled,
Scorning the envious crowd.
68
Gold loves to go through gates and walls,
It defies armed guards and watchmen,
Money throws down gates, unbolts doors,
Brings battlements and fortifications crumbling down.
Bribes sink ships, win wars, unseat the mighty.
Worry and vexed ambition follow money,
Appetite for wealth grows hungrier with feeding.
Yet the more one denies oneself, the more one gains.
Unencumbered, I seek out the camps of those who desire nothing;
A deserter, I hasten away from the side of wealthy men,
Whose comparison makes me poor: for I am wealthy myself
In the absence of my wants,
Rich in already being satisfied.
I have a stream of clear water, a wood of a few acres,
My harvest and milch cows, and my bleating sheep;
Each morning I find eggs in the straw.
I expand my revenues by shrinking my desires,
And live the emperor of my domain.
69
Let us love that we may live:
Let us judge the old women’s gossip
Less worth than a broken jar.
Let the sun rise and set and rise again;
When its brief warmth has left us
We must huddle in the earth
An endless night. So kiss me:
Give me a thousand kisses
Then a hundred kisses
Then a thousand kisses more:
When we have kissed many thousand kisses
We will be beyond the jealousy
Of those who do not know
How many kisses we shared.
70
She is here! She stays, she has promised!
Banish discontent; I have won;
She could not resist my entreaties longer.
Let joy drive out envy:
She has ceased to travel foreign roads,
She says home is best, exchanging
Wide kingdoms for this narrow bed with me.
I did not persuade her with gold or Indian pearls,
But with poetry.
Now my feet tread the stars; I walk the heavens.
She stays: she, the rare, is mine!
71
I was often hurt by your inconstancy,
Yet I never expected betrayal.
See how mistaken I was! Yet when I ask,
You respond in such slow evasive terms.
You raise your brush calmly to your tresses,
And idly examine your looks in the glass.
You go on decorating your breasts with Eastern jewels,
Like a beautiful woman preparing for a new lover.
Alas! is this where it ends?
So Calypso felt when the Ithacan voyager left,
Weeping long ago to the unfeeling waves,
Mourning many months with loosened hair,
Blaming the unkind sea that took him away:
And even though she would never see him again,
Still she grieved, thinking of the happiness they shared.
So Dido lamented, at the same waves and ocean winds
That irretrievably took the Trojan from her,
With tears as salt as the sea, deepening its depths.
Yet no such stories make you pity me, or stop your lying,
O thoughtless girl! Rivers will return to their springs,
The seasons will reverse their course, before I cease loving you.
Do not let these eyes seem worthless to you now,
That were deliberately blind to your perfidies.
You swore by your own that had you been false,
They would close for ever when I kissed them.
Can you look out at the sunlight, and not tremble,
Aware of your falsehoods?
Who has brought this pallor to my cheeks,
And the unwilling tears to wet them?
If I bewail what has happened
It is to warn those who would love
How beauty betrays.
72
Daphnis, it chanced, had made his seat beneath a whispering ilex,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis drove their flocks together,
Thyrsis his sheep, Corydon his goats swollen with milk, to the meadows;
Both in the bloom of life, Arcadians both.
To this place, while I tended my myrtles’ new shoots,
My he-goat, the lord of the flock, had strayed; and I caught sight of Daphnis.
When he saw me he called, ‘Quick! come here, Meliboeus; your goat and kids are safe, and if you can idle awhile,
Rest beneath this shade with me.
Your steers will come by themselves over the meadows to drink;
Here the stream fringes its green banks with waving reeds,
And the old oak swarms with humming