Eternally Yours
O Lucifer, Deceiver, what a great serpent thou art!
Father of nothing, thou art consumed
By a private grief thou alone can know.
Always hungry, never sated,
Too full of thyself to speak —
Thou canst not share thy sorrow,
Thou canst not ask for love.
O Jacob, O Israel, be not so quick to meat!
Thou might love thyself to death.
1/5/2015
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment.
Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy master.
Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.
Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s.
Him the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.
–William Cowper