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Poems and translations

Chapter 41: VILLON PRAYER OF THE OLD WOMAN, VILLON’S MOTHER
By J. M. Synge
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Poetry

About This Book

The collection gathers lyric and ballad-like poems that portray rural landscapes, local speech, and vivid characters through dark humor, elegy, and plainspoken lyricism; many pieces are concise narratives or monologues about love, death, loss, and social life, while others register mythic or meditative moods. A substantial section offers translations and adaptations from Petrarch, Villon, Leopardi, and medieval lyricists, varying between literal and free renderings. A prefatory essay frames the poet's interest in mixing exalted feeling with the material of ordinary life. The sequence balances songful rhythms with austere images and an abrupt, colloquial voice.

VILLON

PRAYER OF THE OLD WOMAN,
VILLON’S MOTHER

Mother of God that’s Lady of the Heavens, take myself, the poor sinner, the way I’ll be along with them that’s chosen.

Let you say to your own Son that He’d have a right to forgive my share of sins, when it’s the like He’s done, many’s the day, with big and famous sinners. I’m a poor aged woman, was never at school, and is no scholar with letters, but I’ve seen pictures in the chapel with Paradise on one side, and harps and pipes in it, and the place on the other side, where sinners do be boiled in torment; the one gave me great joy, the other a great fright and scaring; let me have the good place, Mother of God, and it’s in your faith I’ll live always.

It’s yourself that bore Jesus, that has no end or death, and He the Lord Almighty, that took our weakness and gave Himself to sorrows, a young and gentle man. It’s Himself is our Lord surely, and it’s in that faith I’ll live always.