TO MY EMPTY PURSE
 
Geoffrey Chaucer
 
from The Canterbury Tales
 
 
Vintage clutch, red snake -- photo by Kristin
 
 

                                     
To you, my purse, and to none other wight,
Complain I, for ye be my lady dere;
I am sorry now that ye be light,
For, certes, ye now make me heavy chere;
Me were as lefe be laid upon a bere,
For which unto your mercy thus I crie,
Be heavy againe, or els mote I die.

Now vouchsafe this day or it be night,
That I of you the blissful sowne may here,
Or see your color like the sunne bright,
That of yellowness had never pere;
Ye are my life, ye be my hertes stere,
Queen of comfort and of good companie,
Be heavy again, or else mote I die.

Now purse, thou art to me my lives light,
And saviour, as downe in this world here,
Out of this towne helpe me by your might,
Sith that you will not be my treasure,
For I am slave as nere as any frere,
But I pray unto your curtesie,
Be heavy again, or els mote I die.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Excerpted from:
 
THE HUMOROUS POETRY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, FROM CHAUCER TO SAXE
 
edited by James Parton
 
Narratives, Satires, Enigmas, Burlesques, Parodies, Travesties, Epigrams, Epitaphs, Translations, Including the Most Celebrated Comic, Poems of the Anti-Jacobin, Rejected Addresses, the Ingoldsby Legends, Blackwood's Magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, and Punch.
 
With More Than Two Hundred Epigrams, and the Choicest Humorous Poetry of Wolcott, Cowper, Lamb, Thackeray, Praed, Swift, Scott, Holmes, Aytoun, Gay, Burns, Southey, Saxe, Hood, Prior, Coleridge, Byron, Moore, Lowell, Etc.