WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Farewell cover

Farewell

Chapter 47: MISERERE DOMINE
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A varied collection of poems and short prose pieces that celebrate the Cotswold and Gloucestershire countryside while exploring love, longing, and spiritual yearning. The poems range from concise nature lyrics—observing rivers, hedges, birds, and seasonal light—to sonnets and free-verse meditations that ask for vision, joy, and fellowship. Several pieces foreground homesickness and the solace of ritual and local customs, others offer wry or reflective commentary on mortality, vanity, and daily life. Prose poems and songs intersperse formal verse, producing a sequence that alternates celebratory rural description, quiet grief, religious petition, and gentle humour.

MISERERE DOMINE

Three things a man can do without:
Debtors, a scolding wife, and gout.
First hates for what (he knows) they’ve got,
Second for what (she knows) he’s not,
The third of this unholy lot
Hates him and all he hateth not,
Brisk walking and the pewter pot,
Sound sleep and jovial company.
Who suffers these well may cry, God wot—
Miserere Domine!