Tuesday 10 February 2015

'Fish in a Frying Pan'


'Fish in a Frying Pan', an illustration by John Vernon Lord 
in Aesop's FablesJonathan Cape, 1989, page 40.
The text:

The Fish and the Frying Pan
A Cook to please her master’s taste.
Some Fish in frying pan had plac’d;
Which both begin in plaintive tone,
Their sad disaster to bemoan.
Says one to ’tothers, let us fly,
Nor stay in this hot fat to fry;
So to escape the Cook’s dread ire,
They leapt, and fell into the fire.
Thus ignorant and blind to ruin,
We change full oft to our undoing.

Moral: It is advisable to consider the advantages of one’s present situation, however uneasy it may be, only to exchange it for something else that could be much worse.

Text: adapted from T. Ticklepitcher's version p81 (1788).

Selected parallels: Abstemius 20. L’Estrange 1/273. Perry 725.


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