by Coleridge · Cluster: Money and Gold · Poverty · Imprisonment
Abstract
Mock-serious ode addressing blindfold Fortune on buying a lottery ticket; gold, hope, poverty and the flower of hope. Satirical occasional lyric.
Connections
Topoi: Fortune’s Wheel Motifs: Money and Gold, Flowers Themes & Concepts: Hope, Poverty, Satire of Society, Fate and Free Will Forms & Genres: Ode
Testo integrale / Full text
On buying a Ticket in the Irish Lottery
Composed during a walk to and from the Queen’s Head, Gray’s
Inn Lane, Holborn, and Hornsby’s and Co., Cornhill.
Promptress of unnumber’d sighs,
O snatch that circling bandage from thine eyes!
O look, and smile! No common prayer
Solicits, Fortune! thy propitious care!
For, not a silken son of dress, 5
I clink the gilded chains of politesse,
Nor ask thy boon what time I scheme
Unholy Pleasure’s frail and feverish dream;
Nor yet my view life’s dazzle blinds —
Pomp! — Grandeur! Power! — I give you to the winds! 10
Let the little bosom cold
Melt only at the sunbeam ray of gold —
My pale cheeks glow — the big drops start —
The rebel Feeling riots at my heart!
And if in lonely durance pent, 15
Thy poor mite mourn a brief imprisonment —
That mite at Sorrow’s faintest sound
Leaps from its scrip with an elastic bound!
But oh! if ever song thine ear
Might soothe, O haste with fost’ring hand to rear 20
One Flower of Hope! At Love’s behest,
Trembling, I plac’d it in my secret breast:
And thrice I’ve view’d the vernal gleam,
Since oft mine eye, with Joy’s electric beam,
Illum’d it — and its sadder hue 25
Oft moisten’d with the Tear’s ambrosial dew!
Poor wither’d floweret! on its head
Has dark Despair his sickly mildew shed!
But thou, O Fortune! canst relume
Its deaden’d tints — and thou with hardier bloom 30
May’st haply tinge its beauties pale,
And yield the unsunn’d stranger to the western gale!
1793.