[BNP/E3, 13 – 37]

After all this confounded {…} slumber

So taking several fills which {…}

Advertised from our God in Heaven’s very form.

___

The Creation.

_______

___[1]

[37a^r][2]

And you may bet your boots it was no feast

To make all these and to get them on earth…

It was enough to make one curse one’s birth –

And wish oneself confounded, damned and dead

But as this cursing but betokens death

Of intellect and lack of common sense

God merely stretched himself upon his bed

And gave himself to thinking most intense and deep,

His thought may have been true, {…} and deep,

As ours may be which lie down to ponder

But it was that kind useless and {…}

But to him happened as to us (no wonder)

That the deep thought resolved itself in sleep.

Was a little wroth

To find himself so weak and so worldly lazy

Besides his mind like ours had got

[37a^v]

Then unmanaging amid the toys of youth

The God of men picked out for sum small carts

And houses and to soldiers not like truth

An origin did though not disabled quite coloured

And some very common green[3] darts

With which he had shot[4] at target with delight,

Bending o’er the edge of time and space

Our maker then with an aim very sure

For such an old man, careful and secure

Fired one after another with great skill

And everyone, in swift heading race,

Struck earth and struck these with thick rooted-ease[5].

‘Twas in this way God made the plants and trees.

_______

Then the thing became difficult, so ill

For God was now to make many of beasts

{…}

[1] [37^v] Plauto e Terêncio, Amphytruo

[2] [37a^r] Peripatetic, peripatetic

[3] very ^/quite\ common green ^/coloured\

[4] shot ^/cursed\

[5] ^/deep-\ rooted-ease