In Praise of the Ruler

Refuge and model of the age's rulers, foremost in the world: it is you, whose command time itself obeys. Beside your grandeur, the whole span of the turning sky is like a mere point, imagined faintly in the mind of reason. Desire has gorged itself on your generosity, so full now that it needs something to help it digest. The candle of the heavens, the sun, bends so fully to your will that in your grasp it is as soft as a lump of wax. Remembering your kindness, spring lays out fresh anemones, sealed and stamped like a signed decree. Why else would the dawn keep sneezing, again and again, unless the sky had caught a cold from the fragrance of your nature's flower? If the lion boasts of its courage before your awe, forgive its ravings, for it is only feverish. Gold, in its two-facedness and its pallor, resembles your enemy; that is why the passing days keep it despised and downtrodden. Sometimes it is broken, sometimes clipped, sometimes struck; now bruised by a slap, now battered by a blow. Sometimes the shears cut it clean in two; sometimes it is stoned with weights on the scale. Sometimes it is dragged down the row of the marketplace; sometimes its assigned place is in the blazing fire. Sometimes its face is creased with the wrinkles of the mint's stamp; sometimes its cheek is scarred by the bite of the assayer's teeth. Sometimes it is spent, sometimes buried in the ground. See how your enemy, in its likeness, is nothing but wretched. All the sciences and arts are slaves to my eagerness to serve you, though reason condemns eagerness as a fault. When I ask fate for more, it answers: what more could someone want, when he already has such a noble master? The wheel of fate, so used to such tricks, cast me out from your very circle, like a knocker left at the door. The sincere faith of this servant in this service is threaded, clear for all the world to see, like beads on a string of knowledge. With deprivation so tightly gripping this servant's life, what room is there for robes of honor, for eloquence, for custom and reward? The dust of your feet is passed reverently from hand to hand; see, then, how the pupil of my eye is left with none of it.