"usurer" poems
Dear Friends, this poem was composed many years ago and posted on ‘Poemhunter.com’. Time here is compared to the money lender and miser Shylock in Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant Of Venice’, where Shylock insisted on cutting out a pound of flesh from the merchant Bassanio, for having failed to pay back the loan taken from Shylock! Hope you like it, - Raj
TIME THE GREAT USURER
TIME the great usurer, is a great miser too,
Always knows the cost of things to be paid
back by you!
It readily loans you the desired amount in
number of years.
Smilingly assures and allays all your doubts
and fears.
It makes the loan to appear like a free gratis,
So you hardly bother to take any notice!
But with the passage of growing years and
life depleting with time,
In paying back your interests, you got to
default sometime.
Precisely at that moment, the usurer knocks
rather loud,
And through death takes back its’ principal
amount !
Alas, Time the great Shylock knows the cost
of everything.
When will it learn to appreciate the value
we attach to things?
-Raj Nandy, New Delhi.
Aug 24, 2018
Aug 24, 2018 at 12:02 PM UTC
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard why dost thou abuse,
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which usèd, lives th’ executor to be.
2.9k
So, now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still.
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind,
He learned but surety-like to write for me
Under that bond that him as fist doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer, that putt’st forth all to use,
And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me;
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.
1.3k
Well, the usurer
was generous, nonetheless --
Was it his money?
Dec 17, 2022
Dec 17, 2022 at 4:45 AM UTC
I am gone home to sleep
don't follow me down with your issues
i have no where else i can go for fortress
other than the oblivion to the world
which my dear sleep always crowns me,
my heart has no other fountain of self renew
other than my cost free sleep ,
which your usurer's knack has not yet priced,
leave me alone to sleep
for in my death like sleep
i test freedom of the enslaved
Mar 18, 2014
Mar 18, 2014 at 2:11 PM UTC