George Gascoigne uses bitter and embarrassed tones in the poem “And if I did, what then?” to show that it’s wrong to cheat, and if people do bad things to others it will come back around. Gascoigne uses fishing metaphors to show that you shouldn’t cheat. He says, “Each fisherman can wish That all the seas at every tide Were his alone to fish” (Gascoigne 3.2-4). Gascoigne is saying that every man wishes they could have every woman, but in the next line Gascoigne says that this is in vain. This is important because it shows how defeated he is and how humiliated, he is, at the mistress’s lack of fidelity. Near the end of the poem Gascoigne … “then I will laugh and clap my hand as they do now at me” (Gascoigne 6.4). This quote is saying that