The Poet Promises to Pay His Creditor — When He Has Money
Thou askest me for money (while I’ve none),
And losest time in vain which thou might’st save:
If thou an “I promise to pay” dost crave,
I’ll make no bones at all to give thee one:
I neither grant thee nor refuse the boon;
Since what one never had one never gave;
I promise that I’ll pay thee when I have;
And thou’rt content with my goodwill thereon.
Then let’s have peace, nor let me thus be bored
For those three groats a hundred times a day:
When got, I’ll give them of my own accord.
Why wilt thou thus torment and wear me out?
Why worry a poor devil in this way?
Canst thou not say, “Where nothing is—there’s nought.”
The Poet laments the good old times previous to the existence of Duns, Bailiffs, Writs, and I.O.U.’s.
Oh! blissful days, what time Queen Bertha spun!7
Most fortunate and highly favoured season!
That age hight anciently the golden one,
No doubt because so happy was the reason:
No I.O.U.’s were then, nor writs, to dun,
Nor frequent law-suits, such as now, with fees on;
Nor people then were summoned, should they run
In debt, nor lost their liberty in prison.
But times are changed—not now what once they were;
And woe to that poor devil who gets in debt!
For he must go to gaol and perish there!
And should his dun not be so hard on, yet
He plagues him night and day, wherever met,
As thou dost me—pursuing me everywhere!
He complains that his Creditor uses him worse than would a Pirate.
Algiers and Tunis, Tripoli, Salé,
Places that lie where are the days most hot,
So brute a race of men perhaps have not,
As brutal as my creditor with me:
This man not born like other men could be:
But in ill-will and rancorousness begot,
By one that ne’er sucked mercy’s milk, I wot,
And daily made him bad examples see.
The Barbary Pirate, when he makes a slave,
Robs him of cash that he may find on one,
But does not want his money when he has none:
But, using me more cruelly than a pirate,
My dun don’t care whether or not I have;
When I’ve no money, still he doth require it.
He declares his Dun to be ubiquitous in pursuit of him.
Philosophers hold that if in one place
One body is, another is elsewhere;
Two bodies being quite separate, in no case
A single one can be both here and there.
Moreo’er of that should any person care
To know the physical reason, ’tis to trace....
But, not to wait the causes to deduce,
Suffice we know the fact, as on its face.
Yet if the thing were otherwise than so—
(To cite a case in point) I should pronounce
One body may be here and there at once;
For, by the body o’ me! now there as well,
And now I find thee here, where’er I go:
But how the devil thou dost, I cannot tell.
Gio. Battista Casti.