A Mock Charon. Dialogue

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Title:     A Mock Charon. Dialogue
Author: Richard Lovelace [More Titles by Lovelace]

CHA. W.

W.
Charon! thou slave! thou fooll! thou cavaleer!<81.1>

CHA.
A slave! a fool! what traitor's voice I hear?

W.
Come bring thy boat. CH. No, sir. W. No! sirrah, why?

CHA.
The blest will disagree, and fiends will mutiny
At thy, at thy [un]numbred treachery.

W.
Villain, I have a pass which who disdains,
I will sequester the Elizian plains.

CHA.
Woes me, ye gentle shades! where shall I dwell?
He's come! It is not safe to be in hell.

CHORUS.
Thus man, his honor lost, falls on these shelves;
Furies and fiends are still true to themselves.

CHA.
You must, lost fool, come in. W. Oh, let me in!
But now I fear thy boat will sink with my ore-weighty sin.
Where, courteous Charon, am I now? CHA. Vile rant!<2>
At the gates of thy supreme Judge Rhadamant.

DOUBLE CHORUS OF DIVELS.
Welcome to rape, to theft, to perjurie,
To all the ills thou wert, we canot hope to be;
Oh, pitty us condemned! Oh, cease to wooe,
And softly, softly breath, least you infect us too.

Notes:

<1> This word is used here merely to denote a GALLANT, a FELLOW. From being in its primitive sense a most honourable appellation, it became, during and after the civil war between Charles and the Parliament, a term of equivocal import.

<2> Here equivalent to RANTER, and used for the sake of the metre.

[The end]
Richard Lovelace's poem: Mock Charon. Dialogue

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