Tony Dawson

The Human Condition According to Cardinale Lotario de’ Conti di Segni, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216)

Innocent III, not the jolliest of Popes,
wanted to dash Everyman’s hopes.
To achieve this end, it was his primary mission
to set out his thoughts on the human condition.
His medieval mind produced a short treatise
marked by a really heart-warming thesis:
that Man’s made of slime and is utterly vile,
(and ‘Man’ includes Woman, so no need to smile!)
Man is conceived in the stench of lust,
ending his days as ashes and dust.
Made of rotten blood and unclean semen,
he enters the world pursued by a demon.
In life he breeds fleas, tapeworms, and lice,
and in death, worms, and flies, because of his vice.
If it’s all vomit and dung when he’s ‘in the pink’,
in death he’s reduced to putrefaction and stink.
So no Gay Lothario was this Innocent Pope.
He much preferred to whinge and mope.
‘De miseria humanae conditionis’
was not the work of a handsome Adonis.
While in frescoes he cuts a commanding figure,
his prognathous jaw was only slightly bigger
than the rest of his prominent facial features
that made him appear to be one of those creatures
of Italian stock that looked more like a German
and regarded fellow humans as lower than vermin.
His lantern jaw of the Desperate Dan variety
had a light in there to search out impiety.
Yet people still read the song that he’d sung:
‘the more delicate the food, the more reeking the dung.’
Considering the chant that Lothario intoned,
he tended to leave no turd unstoned.