life of john picus earl of mirandola - The Center for Thomas More ...

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Picus’ Prayer unto God
What service may so desirable be
As where all turneth to thine own speed?°
Who is so good, so lovely eke as He
Who hath already done so much for thee,
As He that first thee made, and on the rood°
Eft thee redeemèd with His precious blood? ∆1
A PRAYER 2 OF ¦PICUS MIRANDULA UNTO GOD
O holy God of dreadful° majesty,
Verily one in three and three in one,
Whom¦ angels serve, Whose ¦work all creatures be,
Which heaven and earth directest all alone¦:
We Thee beseech, good Lord, with woeful moan,
Spare us wretches and wash away our guilt
That we be not by Thy just anger spilt.
In strait° balance of rigorous judgment
If Thou shouldst our sin ponder and weigh,
Who able were to bear Thy punishment? 3
The whole engine of all this world, 4 ⌐ I say, ¬
2 speed success / 5 rood cross / 10 dreadful inspiring reverence or awe (OED s.v. dreadful
a. 2a) / 18 strait exact, strict
¦8 More omits Ioannis, “Giovanni” (CW 1:378, 379). / 12 More omits super excelsi flammantia
moenia mundi . . . turba beata chori, “beyond the lofty, flaming walls of the world [by] the blessed
multitude of the [angelic] choir” (CW 1:378, 379). / More omits immensum hoc oculis spectabile
nostris omnipotens quondam dextra, “[who] long ago [created] with your omnipotent right hand
[this] immense [work] which is visible to our eyes” (CW 1:378, 379). / 13 More omits nutu
. . . cuius ab imperio fulmina missa cadunt, “with your nod, by whose command the thunderbolts
are thrown down” (CW 1:379, 380).
Δ1. Serve God . . . blood?: This stanza is a complete reworking of Picus’ text, bearing very little
resemblance to the Latin original (see CW 1:378.6–14).
2. A PRAYER: The only portion of More’s translations of Picus to survive in manuscript
form, this prayer was originally composed by Picus in verse. Its Latin title is Deprecatoria ad
Deum, “A prayer to God for mercy” (CW 1:378, 379).
3. Who able . . . punishment?: More condenses Picus’ Latin, which reads quis queat horrendum
viventis ferre flagellum vindicis & plagas sustinuisse graves?, “who could bear the horrible scourge of
the living avenger and endure his heavy strokes?” (CW 1:378, 379). The allusion in this and the
previous two lines is to Psalm 129:3 (cf. also Psalm 142:2; Romans 3:20; and Galatians 2:16).
4. The whole . . . world: More’s expansion of the Latin machina (CW 1:378, 379). In context the
“whole engine of all this world” means something like “universal frame,” perhaps after Lucretius’
machina mundi (OED s.v. engine sb. 6a engine of the world). More also employs the phrase
in his Dialogue concerning Heresies I: “there was a god, eyther maker or gouernour or bothe, of
all this hole engyne of the worlde” (CW 6:73.4-5).
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