Food poems
/ page 80 of 95 /
Inferno (English)
© Dante Alighieri
CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Part 2 of Trout Fishing in America
© Richard Brautigan
ANOTHER METHOD OF MAKING WALNUT CATSUPAnd this is a very small cookbook for Trout Fishing in Americaas if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet andTrout Fishing in America had Maria Callas for a girlfriendand they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles.Compote of ApplesTake a dozen of golden pippins, pare themnicely and take the core out with a smallpenknife; put them into some water, andlet them be well scalded; then take a littleof the water with some sugar, and a fewapples which may be sliced into it, andlet the whole boil till it comes to a syrup;then pour it over your pippins, and garnishthem with dried cherries and lemon-peelcut fine. You must take care that yourpippins are not split.And Maria Callas sang to Trout Fishing in America asthey ate their apples together.A Standing Crust for Great PiesTake a peck of flour and six pounds of butterboiled in a gallon of water: skim it off intothe flour, and as little of the liquor as youcan. Work it up well into a paste, and thenpull it into pieces till it is cold. Then makeit up into what form you please.And Trout Fishing in America smiled at Maria Callas asthey ate their pie crust together.A Spoonful PuddingTake a spoonful of flour, a spoonful ofcream or milk, an egg, a little nutmeg,ginger, and salt. Mix all together, andboil it in a little wooden dish half an hour.If you think proper you may add a fewcurrants . And Trout Fishing in America said, "The moon's comingout." And Maria Callas said, "Yes, it is." Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup Take green walnuts before the shell is formed, and grind them in a crab-mill, or pound them in a marble mortar. Squeeze out the juice through a coarse cloth, and put to every gallon of juice a pound of anchovies, and the same quantity of bay-salt, four ounces of Jamaica pepper, two of long and two of black pepper; of mace, cloves, and ginger, each an ounce, and a stick of horseradish. Boil all together till reduced to half the quantity, and then put it into a pot. When it is cold, bottle it close, and in three months it will be fit for use. And Trout Fishing in America and Maria Callas pouredwalnut catsup on their hamburgers.PROLOGUE TO GRIDER CREEKMooresville, Indiana, is the town that John Dillinger camefrom, and the town has a John Dillinger Museum. You cango in and look around. Some towns are known as the peach capital of America orthe cherry capital or the oyster capital, and there's alwaysa festival and the photograph of a pretty girl in a bathing suit. Mooresville, Indiana, is the John Dillinger capital of America. Recently a man moved there with his wife, and he discoveredhundreds of rats in his basement. They were huge, slowmovingchild-eyed rats. When his wife had to visit some of her relatives for a fewdays, the man went out and bought a .38 revolver and a lotof ammunition. Then he went down to the basement wherethe rats were, and he started shooting them. It didn't botherthe rats at all. They acted as if it were a movie and startedeating their dead companions for popcorn. The man walked over to a rat that was busy eating a friendand placed the pistol against the rat's head. The rat did notmove and continued eating away. When the hammer clickedback, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the cornerof its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kindof friendly look as if to say, "When my mother was young shesang like Deanna Durbin. " The man pulled the trigger. He had no sense of humor. There's always a single feature, a double feature and aneternal feature playing at the Great Theater in Mooresville,Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America.
GRIDER CREEKI had heard there was some good fishing in there and it wasrunning clear while all the other large creeks were runningmuddy from the snow melting off the Marble Mountains. I also heard there were some Eastern brook trout in there,high up in the mountains, living in the wakes of beaver darns. The guy who drove the school bus drew a map of GriderCreek, showing where the good fishing was. We were standingin front of Steelhead Lodge when he drew the map. It wasa very hot day. I'd imagine it was a hundred degrees. You had to have a car to get to Grider Creek where thegood fishing was, and I didn't have a car. The map was nice,though. Drawn with a heavy dull pencil on a piece of paperbag. With a little square for a sawmill.
THE BALLET FOR TROUT FISHING IN AMERICAHow the Cobra Lily traps insects is a ballet for Trout Fishingin America, a ballet to be performed at the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles. The plant is beside me here on the back porch. It died a few days after I bought it at Woolworth's. Thatwas months ago, during the presidential election of nineteenhundred and sixty. I buried the plant in an empty Metrecal can. The side of the can says, "Metrecal Dietary for WeightControl, " and below that reads, "Ingredients: Non-fat milksolids, soya flour, whole milk solids, sucrose, starch, cornoil, coconut oil, yeast, imitation vanilla, " but the can's onlya graveyard now for a Cobra Lily that has turned dry andbrown and has black freckles. As a kind of funeral wreath, there is a red, white andblue button sticking in the plant and the words on it say, "I'mfor Nixon." The main energy for the ballet comes from a descriptionof the Cobra Lily. The description could be used as a welcomemat on the front porch of hell or to conduct an orchestraof mortuaries with ice-cold woodwinds or be an atomicmailman in the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines. "Nature has endowed the Cobra Lily with the means ofcatching its own food. The forked tongue is covered withhoney glands which attract the insects upon which it feeds.Once inside the hood, downward pointing hairs prevent theinsect from crawling out. The digestive liquids are found inthe base of the plant. "The supposition that it is necessary to feed the CobraLily a piece of hamburger or an insect daily is erroneous. "I hope the dancers do a good job of it, they hold ourimagination in there feet, dancing in Los Angles for TroutFishing in America.
A WALDEN POND FOR WINOSThe autumn carried along with it, like the roller coaster ofa flesh-eating plant, port wine and the people who drank thatdark sweet wine, people long since gone, except for me. Always wary of the police, we drank in the safest placewe could find, the park across from the church. There were three poplar trees in the middle of the parkand there was a statue of Benjamin Franklin in front of thetrees. We sat there and drank port. At home my wife was pregnant. I would call on the telephone after I finished work and say,"I won't be home for a little while. I'm going to have a drinkwith some friends. " The three of us huddled in the park, talking. They wereboth broken-down artists from New Orleans where they haddrawn pictures of tourists in Pirate's Alley. Now in San Francisco, with the cold autumn wind uponthem, they had decided that the future held only two directions:They were either going to open up a flea circus or committhemselves to an insane asylum. So they talked about it while they drank wine. They talked about how to make little clothes for fleas bypasting pieces of colored paper on their backs. They said the way that you trained fleas was to make themdependent upon you for their food. This was done by letting themfeed off you at an appointed hour. They talked about making little flea wheelbarrows andpool tables and bicycles. They would charge fifty-cents admission for their flea circus.The business was certain to have a future to it. Perhaps theywould even get on the Ed Sullivan Show. They of course did not have their fleas yet, but they couldeasily be obtained from a white cat. Then they decided that the fleas that lived on SiameseCats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas thatlived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense thatdrinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas. And so it went on until it was exhausted and we went andbought another fifth of port wine and returned to the treesand Benjamin Franklin. Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning tocool off in the correct manner of eternity and office girlswere returning like penguins from Montgomery Street. Theylooked at us hurriedly and mentally registered: winos. Then the two artists talked about committing themselvesto an insane asylum for the winter. They talked about howwarm it would be in the insane asylum, with television, cleansheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes,a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes alocked razor and lovely young student nurses. Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. Nowinter spent there could be a total loss.
Part 10 of Trout Fishing in America
© Richard Brautigan
WITNESS FOR TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA PEACEIn San Francisco around Easter time last year, they had atrout fishing in America peace parade. They had thousandsof red stickers printed and they pasted them on their smallforeign cars, and on means of national communication liketelephone poles. The stickers had WITNESS FOR TROUT FISHING IN AM-ERICA PEACE printed on them. Then this group of college- and high-school-trained Com-munists, along with some Communist clergymen and theirMarxist-taught children, marched to San Francisco fromSunnyvale, a Communist nerve center about forty miles away. It took them four days to walk to San Francisco. Theystopped overnight at various towns along the way, and slepton the lawns of fellow travelers. They carried with them Communist trout fishing in Ameri-ca peace propaganda posters:"DON'T DROP AN H-BOMB ON THE OLD FISHING HOLE I" "ISAAC WALTON WOULD'VE HATED THE BOMB!" "ROYAL COACHMAN, SI! ICBM, NO!" They carried with them many other trout fishing in Amer-ica peace inducements, all following the Communist worldconquest line: the Gandhian nonviolence Trojan horse. When these young, hard-core brainwashed members ofthe Communist conspiracy reached the "Panhandle, " theemigre Oklahoma Communist sector of San Francisco, thou-sands of other Communists were waiting for them. Thesewere Communists who couldn't walk very far. They barelyhad enough strength to make it downtown. Thousands of Communists, protected by the police, marcheddown to Union Square, located in the very heart of San Fran-cisco. The Communist City Hall riots in 1960 had presentedevidence of it, the police let hundreds of Communists escape,but the trout fishing in America peace parade was the finalindictment: police protection. Thousands of Communists marched right into the heart ofSan Francisco, and Communist speakers incited them forhours and the young people wanted to blow up Colt Tower, butthe Communist clergy told them to put away their plasticbombs. "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men shoulddo to you, do ye even so to them . . . There will be no needfor explosives, " they said. America needs no other proof. The Red shadow of theGandhian nonviolence Trojan horse has fallen across Ameri-ca, and San Francisco is its stable. Obsolete is the mad rapist's legendary piece of candy. Atthis very moment, Communist agents are handing out Witnessfor trout fishing in America peace tracts to innocent childrenriding the cable cars.
FOOTNOTE CHAPTER TO "RED LIP"Living in the California bush we had no garbage service. Ourgarbage was never greeted in the early morning by a manwith a big smile on his face and a kind word or two. Wecouldn't burn any of the garbage because it was the dry seas-on and everything was ready to catch on fire anyway, includ-ing ourselves. The garbage was a problem for a little whileand then we discovered a way to get rid of it. We took the garbage down to where there were three aban-doned houses in a row. We carried sacks full of tin cans,papers, peelings, bottles and Popeyes. We stopped at the last abandoned house where there werethousands of old receipts to the San Francisco Chroniclethrown all over the bed and the children's toothbrushes werestill in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Behind the place was an old outhouse and to get down to it,you had to follow the path down past some apple trees and apatch of strange plants that we thought were either a goodspice that would certainly enhance our cooking or the plantswere deadly nightshade that would cause our cooking to beless. We carried the garbage down to the outhouse and alwaysopened the door slowly because that was the only way youcould open it, and on the wall there was a roll of toilet paper,so old it looked like a relative, perhaps a cousin, to the Mag-na Carta. We lifted up the lid of the toilet and dropped the garbagedown into the darkness. This went on for weeks and weeksuntil it became very funny to lift the lid of the toilet and in-stead of seeing darkness below or maybe the murky abstractoutline of garbage, we saw bright, definite and lusty garbageheaped up almost to the top. If you were a stranger and went down there to take an in-nocent crap, you would've had quite a surprise when you lift-ed up the lid. We left the California bush just before it became necessaryto stand on the toilet seat and step into that hole, crushingthe garbage down like an accordion into the abyss.
THE CLEVELAND WRECKING YARDUntil recently my knowledge about the Cleveland WreckingYard had come from a couple of friends who'd bought thingsthere. One of them bought a huge window: the frame, glassand everything for just a few dollars. It was a fine-lookingwindow. Then he chopped a hole in the side of his house up onPotrero Hill and put the window in. Now he has a panoramicview of the San Francisco County Hospital. He can practically look right down into the wards and seeold magazines eroded like the Grand Canyon from endlessreadings. He can practically hear the patients thinking aboutbreakfast: I hate milk and thinking about dinner: I hate peas,and then he can watch the hospital slowly drown at night,hopelessly entangled in huge bunches of brick seaweed. He bought that window at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. My other friend bought an iron roof at the Cleveland Wreck-ing Yard and took the roof down to Big Sur in an old stationwagon and then he carried the iron roof on his back up theside of a mountain. He carried up half the roof on his back.It was no picnic. Then he bought a mule, George, from Pleas-anton. George carried up the other half of the roof. The mule didn't like what was happening at all. He lost alot of weight because of the ticks, and the smell of the wild-cats up on the plateau made him too nervous to graze there.My friend said jokingly that George had lost around two hun-dred pounds. The good wine country around Pleasanton in theLivermore Valley probably had looked a lot better to Georgethan the wild side of the Santa Lucia Mountains. My friend's place was a shack right beside a huge fire-place where there had once been a great mansion during the1920s, built by a famous movie actor. The mansion was builtbefore there was even a road down at Big Sur. The mansionhad been brought over the mountains on the backs of mules,strung out like ants, bringing visions of the good life to thepoison oak, the ticks, and the salmon. The mansion was on a promontory, high over the Pacific.Money could see farther in the 1920s and one could look outand see whales and the Hawaiian Islands and the Kuomintangin China. The mansion burned down years ago. The actor died. His mules were made into soap. His mistresses became bird nests of wrinkles. Now only the fireplace remains as a sort of Carthaginianhomage to Hollywood. I was down there a few weeks ago to see my friend's roof.I wouldn't have passed up the chance for a million dollars,as they say. The roof looked like a colander to me. If thatroof and the rain were running against each other at BayMeadows, I'd bet on the rain and plan to spend my winningsat the World's Fair in Seattle. My own experience with the Cleveland Wrecking Yard be-gan two days ago when I heard about a used trout streamthey had on sale out at the Yard. So I caught the Number 15bus on Columbus Avenue and went out there for the first time. There were two Negro boys sitting behind me on the bus.They were talking about Chubby Checker and the Twist. Theythought that Chubby Checker was only fifteen years old be-cause he didn't have a mustache. Then they talked about someother guy who did the twist forty-four hours in a row untilhe saw George Washington crossing the Delaware. "Man, that's what I call twisting, " one of the kids said. "I don't think I could twist no forty-four hours in a row, "the other kid said. "That's a lot of twisting. " I got off the bus right next to an abandoned Time Gasolinefilling station and an abandoned fifty-cent self-service carwash. There was a long field on one side of the filling station.The field had once been covered with a housing project dur-ing the war, put there for the shipyard workers. On the other side of the Time filling station was the Cleve-land Wrecking Yard. I walked down there to have a look atthe used trout stream. The Cleveland Wrecking Yard has avery long front window filled with signs and merchandise. There was a sign in the window advertising a laundry marking machine for $65. 00. The original cost of the mach- ine was $175. 00. Quite a saving. There was another sign advertising new and used two and three ton hoists. I wondered how many hoists it would take to move a trout stream. There was another sign that said: THE FAMILY GIFT CENTER, GIFT SUGGESTIONS FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY The window was filled with hundreds of items for the en- tire family. Daddy, do you know what I want for Christmas? son? A bathroom. Mommy do you know what I want for Christmas? What, Patricia? Some roofing material There were jungle hammocks in the window for distant relatives and dollar-ten-cent gallons of earth-brown enamel paint for other loved ones. There was also a big sign that said: USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE. MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED, I went inside and looked at some ship's lanterns that were for sale next to the door. Then a salesman came up to me and said in a pleasant voice, "Can I help you?" "Yes, " I said. "I'm curious about the trout stream you have for sale. Can you tell me something about it? How are you selling it?" "We're selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left. A man came in here this morning and bought 563 feet. He's going to give it to his niece for a birthday present, " the salesman said. "We're selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers grass and ferns we're also sell- ing extra. The insects we're giving away free with a mini- mum purchase of ten feet of stream. " "How much are you selling the stream for?" I asked. "Six dollars and fifty-cents a foot, " he said. "That's for the first hundred feet. After that it's five dollars a foot." "How much are the birds?" I asked. "Thirty-five cents apiece, " he said. "But of course they're used. We can't guarantee anything." "How wide is the stream?" I asked. "You said you wereselling it by the length, didn't you?" "Yes, " he said. "We're selling it by the length. Its widthruns between five and eleven feet. You don't have to pay any-thing extra for width. It's not a big stream, but it's verypleasant. " "What kinds of animals do you have 7" I asked. "We only have three deer left, " he said. "Oh What about flowers 7" "By the dozen, " he said. "Is the stream clear?" I asked. "Sir, " the salesman said. "I wouldn't want you to thinkthat we would ever sell a murky trout stream here. We al-ways make sure they're running crystal clear before we eventhink about moving them. " "Where did the stream come from?" I asked. "Colorado, " he said. "We moved it with loving care. We'venever damaged a trout stream yet. We treat them all as ifthey were china. " "You're probably asked this all the time, but how's fish-ing in the stream?" I asked. "Very good, " he said. "Mostly German browns, but thereare a few rainbows. " "What do the trout cost?" I asked. "They come with the stream, " he said. "Of course it's allluck. You never know how many you're going to get or howbig they are. But the fishing's very good, you might say it'sexcellent. Both bait and dry fly, " he said smiling. "Where's the stream at?" I asked. "I'd like to take a lookat it. " "It's around in back, " he said. "You go straight throughthat door and then turn right until you're outside. It's stackedin lengths. You can't miss it. The waterfalls are upstairs inthe used plumbing department. " "What about the animals?" "Well, what's left of the animals are straight back fromthe stream. You'll see a bunch of our trucks parked on aroad by the railroad tracks. Turn right on the road and fol-low it down past the piles of lumber. The animal shed's rightat the end of the lot. " "Thanks, " I said. "I think I'11 look at the waterfalls first.You don't have to come with me. Just tell me how to get thereand I'11 find my own way. "All right, " he said. "Go up those stairs. You'll see abunch of doors and windows, turn left and you'll find theused plumbing department. Here's my card if you need anyhelp. " "Okay, " I said. "You've been a great help already. Thanksa lot. I'11 take a look around." "Good luck, " he said. I went upstairs and there were thousands of doors there.I'd never seen so many doors before in my life. You couldhave built an entire city out of those doors. Doorstown. Andthere were enough windows up there to build a little suburbentirely out of windows. Windowville. I turned left and went back and saw the faint glow of pearl-colored light. The light got stronger and stronger as I wentfarther back, and then I was in the used plumbing department,surrounded by hundreds of toilets. The toilets were stacked on shelves. They were stackedfive toilets high. There was a skylight above the toilets thatmade them glow like the Great Taboo Pearl of the South Seamovies. Stacked over against the wall were the waterfalls. Therewere about a dozen of them, ranging from a drop of a fewfeet to a drop of ten or fifteen feet. There was one waterfall that was over sixty feet long.There were tags on the pieces of the big falls describing thecorrect order for putting the falls back together again. The waterfalls all had price tags on them. They weremore expensive than the stream. The waterfalls were sellingfor $19.00 a foot. I went into another room where there were piles of sweet-smelling lumber, glowing a soft yellow from a different colorskylight above the lumber. In the shadows at the edge of theroom under the sloping roof of the building were many sinksand urinals covered with dust, and there was also anotherwaterfall about seventeen feet long, lying there in two lengthsand already beginning to gather dust. I had seen all I wanted of the waterfalls, and now I wasvery curious about the trout stream, so I followed the sales-man's directions and ended up outside the building. O I had never in my life seen anything like that troutstream. It was stacked in piles of various lengths: ten, fif-teen, twenty feet, etc. There was one pile of hundred-footlengths. There was also a box of scraps. The scraps werein odd sizes ranging from six inches to a couple of feet. There was a loudspeaker on the side of the building andsoft music was coming out. It was a cloudy day and seagullswere circling high overhead. Behind the stream were big bundles of trees and bushes.They were covered with sheets of patched canvas. You couldsee the tops and roots sticking out the ends of the bundles. I went up close and looked at the lengths of stream. Icould see some trout in them. I saw one good fish. I sawsome crawdads crawling around the rocks at the bottom. It looked like a fine stream. I put my hand in the water.It was cold and felt good. I decided to go around to the side and look at the animals.I saw where the trucks were parked beside the railroadtracks. I followed the road down past the piles of lumber,back to the shed where the animals were. The salesman had been right. They were practically outof animals. About the only thing they had left in any abun-dance were mice. There were hundreds of mice. Beside the shed was a huge wire birdcage, maybe fiftyfeet high, filled with many kinds of birds. The top of the cagehad a piece of canvas over it, so the birds wouldn't get wetwhen it rained. There were woodpeckers and wild canariesand sparrows. On my way back to where the trout stream was piled, Ifound the insects. They were inside a prefabricated steelbuilding that was selling for eighty-cents a square foot. Therewas a sign over the door. It said INSECTS
A HALF-SUNDAY HOMAGE TO A WHOLE LEONARDO DA VINCIOn this funky winter day in rainy San Francisco I've had avision of Leonardo da Vinci. My woman's out slaving away,no day off, working on Sunday. She left here at eight o'clockthis morning for Powell and California. I've been sitting hereever since like a toad on a log dreaming about Leonardo daVinci. I dreamt he was on the South Bend Tackle Company pay-roll, but of course, he was wearing different clothes andspeaking with a different accent and possessor of a differentchildhood, perhaps an American childhood spent in a townlike Lordsburg, New Mexico, or Winchester, Virginia. I saw him inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishingin America. I saw him first of all working with his imagina-tion, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little ofthis and a little of that, and then adding motion and then tak-ing it away and then coming back again with a different motion,and in the end the lure was invented. He called his bosses in. They looked at the lure and allfainted. Alone, standing over their bodies, he held the lurein his hand and gave it a name. He called it "The Last Supper."Then he went about waking up his bosses. In a matter of months that trout fishing lure was the sen-sation of the twentieth century, far outstripping such shallowaccomplishments as Hiroshima or Mahatma Gandhi. Millionsof "The Last Supper" were sold in America. The Vatican or-dered ten thousand and they didn't even have any trout there. Testimonials poured in. Thirty-four ex-presidents of theUnited States all said, ''I caught my limit on 'The Last Supper.'''
On a Vulgar Error
© Clive Staples Lewis
No. It's an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way Prosaic
mad, inelegant, or what not.
Sorry
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
Dear parents,
I forgive you my life,
Begotten in a drab town,
The intention was good;
Passing the street now,
I see still the remains of sunlight.
The Seven Of Pentacles
© Marge Piercy
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
© Marge Piercy
When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?
The Friend
© Marge Piercy
We sat across the table.
he said, cut off your hands.
they are always poking at things.
they might touch me.
I said yes.
To Be of Use
© Marge Piercy
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
Stony Grey Soil
© Patrick Kavanagh
You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life conquering plough!
The mandrill stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
My Tenants
© Helen Hunt Jackson
I never had a title-deed
To my estate. But little heed
Eyes give to me, when I walk by
My fields, to see who occupy.
Salts And Oils
© Philip Levine
In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog
believing it was Peking duck. Later,
in Tampa I bunked with an insane sailor
who kept a .38 Smith and Wesson in his shorts.
The Manuscript of Saint Alexius
© Augusta Davies Webster
But, when my father thought my words took shape
of other than boy's prattle, he grew grave,
and answered me "Alexius, thou art young,
and canst not judge of duties; but know this
thine is to serve God, living in the world."
Ode to the Goddess Ceres
© Thomas Moore
Dear Goddess of Corn, whom the ancients we know,
(Among other odd whims of those comical bodies,)
Adorn'd with somniferous poppies, to show,
Thou wert always a true Country-gentleman's Goddess.
The H. Communion
© George Herbert
Not in rich furniture, or fine array,
Nor in a wedge of gold,
Thou, who from me wast sold,
To me dost now thy self convey;
For so thou should'st without me still have been,
Leaving within me sin:
Providence
© George Herbert
O Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?
Affliction
© George Herbert
When thou didst entice to thee my heart,
I thought the service brave:
So many joys I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of natural delights,
Augmented with thy gracious benefits.
