Prudence Primrose

詩集Poems

The Fiddle and the Sand

13 August 2025

Satan may play the fiddle1,But this verse is not a riddle,Through life we spar with Satan's hand,Yet we all end up returned to sand2,Our Maker's wrath we shall endure,No shriek, nor moan, nor prayer,Can save thee from thy own will,That raises thee upon a hill,Formed from thy toils, thy tribulations too,Will the scales of Judgement3 to you be shrew?

To be prudent4 is to die daily5,Though you may go through life gayly,Satan's temptations we may forgo and scorn,Yet thou cannot escape Thee from the day we be born,Oh Death, you unspeakable thing,That terrifying other face of our great King,None knoweth when thou cometh or cometh not,By your hand,All things are wrought.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. The best-known fiddle bargain in classical music is Giuseppe Tartini's. He said that in 1713 he dreamed the devil took his violin and played so beautifully that he woke breathless, and that his “Devil's Trill” sonata was his attempt to catch it: the best he ever wrote, and far short of what he heard. source ↩
  2. God's sentence on Adam in Genesis 3:19 (KJV): “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The poem changes dust to sand, which suits a poem about the wheel of time: sand is dust that has been counted. source ↩
  3. The oldest scales of judgement are Egyptian: at the weighing of the heart, Anubis weighs the dead person's heart against the feather of Ma'at, Thoth records the result, and a heart heavier than the feather is devoured by the goddess Ammit. The poem's verdict, like Egypt's, is built from the toils of the life itself. source ↩
  4. Prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues of ancient Greek philosophy; its Latin root providentia means foresight, and Aquinas called it the “charioteer of the virtues” because it judges what is right in a given time and place. The poem's version of foresight is looking to the end every day. source ↩
  5. Paul writes, “I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31, KJV). Plato's Phaedo has the same thought in Greek terms: the proper practice of philosophy is about “nothing else but dying and being dead.” Both treat daily death as the discipline of a serious life. source ↩