lower prices, cheapen honest wares.
bianca
My lord, there is no reason you should stay,
guido
Thou art my reason, peerless, perfect, thou,
The reason I am here and my life’s goal,
For I was born to love the fairest things …
bianca
To buy the fairest things that can be bought.
guido
Cruel Bianca! Cover me with scorn,
I answer born to love thy priceless self,
That never to a market could be brought,
No more than winged souls that sail and soar
Among the planets or about the moon.
bianca
It is so much thy habit to buy love,
Or that which is for sale and labelled love,
Hardly couldst thou conceive a priceless love.
·140· But though my love has never been for sale
I have been in a market bought and sold.
guido
This is some riddle which thy sweet wit reads
To baffle mine and mock me yet again.
bianca
My marriage, sir, I speak of marriage now,
That common market where my husband went
And prides himself he made a bargain then,
guido
The wretched chapman, how I hate his soul.
bianca
He was a better bidder than thyself,
And knew with whom to deal … he did not speak
Of gold to me, but in my father’s ear
He made it clink: to me he spoke of love,
Honest and free and open without price.
guido
O white Bianca, lovely as the moon,
The light of thy pure soul and shining wit
·141· Shows me my shame, and makes the thing I was
Slink like a shadow from the thing I am.
bianca
Let that which casts the shadow act, my lord,
And waste no thought on what its shadow does
Or has done. Are youth, and strength, and love
Balked by mere shadows, so that they forget
Themselves so far they cannot be recalled?
guido
Nobility is here, not in the court.
There are the tinsel stars, here is the moon,
Whose tranquil splendour makes a day of night.
I have been starved by ladies, specks of light,
And glory drowns me now I see the moon.
bianca
I have refused round sums of solid gold
And shall not be by tinsel phrases bought.
·142· guido
Dispute no more, witty, divine Bianca;
Dispute no more. See I have brought my lute!
Close lock the door. We will sup with the moon
Like Persian princes, that, in Babylon
Sup in the hanging gardens of the king.
I know an air that can suspend the soul
As high in heaven as those towered-gardens hang.
bianca
My husband may return, we are not safe.
guido
Didst thou not say that he would sleep from home?
bianca
He was not sure, he said it might be so.
He was not sure—and he would send my aunt
To sleep with me, if he did so decide,
And she has not yet come.
·143· guido [starting]
Hark, what’s that?
[They listen, the sound of Maria’s voice in anger with some one is faintly heard. J
bianca
It is Maria scolds some gossip crone.
guido
I thought the other voice had been a man’s.
bianca
All still again, old crones are often gruff.
You should be gone, my lord.
guido
O, sweet Bianca!
How can I leave thee now! Thy beauty made
Two captives of my eyes, and they were mad
To feast them on thy form, but now thy wit,
The liberated perfume of a bud,
Which while a bud seemed perfect, but now is
That which can make its former self forgot:
How can I leave the flower who loved the leaf?
·144· Till now I was the richest prince in Florence,
I am a lover now would shun its throngs,
And put away all state and seek
