II
Now here’s a story that is told,
Incredible, by men of old:
Once starving on a winter’s day
By secret, miserable way
Thou soughtest out the Ant and found
Her spacious warehouse underground.
That rich possessor in the sun
Was busy drying, one by one,
Her treasures, moist with the night’s dew,
Before she buried them from view [[23]]
In corn-sacks of sufficient size;
Then didst thou sue with tearful eyes,
Saying, “Alas! This deadly breeze
Pursues me everywhere; I freeze
With hunger; let me fill (no more!)
My wallet from that copious store;
Next year, when melons are full-blown,
Be sure I shall repay the loan!
“Lend me a little corn!”—Absurd!
Of course she will not hear a word;
Thou wilt not win, for all thy pain,
From bulging sacks a single grain.
“Be off and scrape the binns!” she cries:
“Who sang in June, in winter dies.”
Thus doth the ancient tail impart
Fit moral for a miser’s heart;
Bids him all charity forget
And draw his purse-strings tighter yet.
May colic chase such scurvy knaves
With pangs internal to their graves!
A sorry fabulist, indeed,
Who fancied that the winter’s need
Would drive thee to subsist, forlorn,
On Flies, on grubs, on grains of corn;
No need was ever thine of those,
For whom the honied fountain flows.
What matters winter? All thy kin
Beneath the earth are gathered in; [[24]]
Thou sleepest with unwaking heart,
While the frail body falls apart
In rags that unregarded lie,
Save by the Ant’s rapacious eye.
She, groping greedily, one day
Makes of thy shrivelled corpse her prey;
Dissects the trunk, gnaws limb from limb,
Concocts, according to her whim,
A salad such grim housewives know,
A tit-bit saved for hours of snow.