Titus Lucretius Carus

“ Goddess! in whom our Rome is proud to trace
Nursing Mother of an Imperial race;
Who ’neath the constellations, as they range,
Heav’n’s standard-bearers, in soft interchange
Of night’s watches, rulest how, when, and where.
In Ocean’s finny depths, in upper air,
And teeming soil, Life, urgent to be born,
Shall at thy smile burst forth to greet the morn,
All without thee was gusty darkness;
then
A sudden rapture stirs in Gods and Men!
Thou comest! Winds fall; the sky no more low’rs:
Earth embroiders herself with fragrant flow’rs ”

“ A multitude of kinds out of life’s book;
And Earth, as women, fills not gaps; her stage
Of maternity obeys laws of age.
Not Man, first-born of Earth, of those that fail;
Child of a lusty mother, hard and hale;
Built on a frame-work of big, solid bone,
With tough sinews to weld the flesh in one;
Not made with heat to faint, or cold to freeze,
To sicken with strange meat, or by disease.
Men led wandering wild beasts’ lives; the sun
Had revolutions numberless to run
Ere they harrowed fields, guided the curved ploughs,
Planted young orchards, or lopped rotting boughs. ”

“ Anchises, lit with an unearthly light:
“My Son,” he said, “here am I by Jove’s grace;
He pities, late, the sorrows of our race,
And has sent me to comfort and advise.
Let a new Troy in Sicily arise,
Peopled by many who would stay behind.
With the young and bravest, sail thou, and find
A realm in Latium; make its rude tribes feel
The temper of their Trojan Master’s steel.
But, first, thou to the Nether World descend,
And traverse from the threshold to the end
In search of me; not that I dwell in Dis,
With the curst, but the pleasant fields of bliss. ”

“ The tenant to buy life with all he had,
His fate would be to glut a lion’s maw.
Plunged live in a live tomb by tooth and claw;
Though worse their doom, who, with huge gobbets jagged
From the bleeding flesh, about the woods dragged
Noisome centres of horror and pest—palms
Trembling o’er sores for which they knew no balms;
Calling with agonizing cries on death
To sink their remains to the world beneath. ”

“ To this our mighty Rome, not just on loan,
But to live her life, be her very own,
She would wax overweening? Yet the woe
Must surely wake thy pity, when, below,
Thou hear’st the wails numberless for such charms
Borne to their pyre upon the Field of Arms;
And Thou, old Tiber, as thou flowest by
The tomb in which the loved One’s ashes lie,
Wilt not forget how thou hast seen him play
Oft on thy banks young, beautiful, and gay.
Never will hope be raised so high by boy
Blending the blood of Latium and Troy ”

“ Certain of victory, ne’er quitting hold;
The other, a wild mare on a wild plain.
You heard the cold calm trainer shake the rein,
Tear mutinous mouth with the cruel bit,
Mock at the passion that resented it.
Then quiet; Æneas once more began:
“Speak not of risks endurable by man;
None daunt me; long since I foresaw the whole,
Rehearsed what worst could happen in my soul.
I fear no ordeal; if Hell’s gate be here,
As they say, and it front the darksome mere—
Acheron’s wash—I crave it of thy grace,
Holy One, to meet my sire face to face. ”

“ This our world has beauties everywhere;
Grand are your forests, Medes, and wondrous fair;
Travellers to Blest Araby have told
Of sands that grow frankincense, streams of gold;
Strange legends run of bulls with fire for breath,
Dragons sowing plains with myriad teeth,
Till in the place of harvest’s yellow ears
A battle field gleamed with steel helms and spears.
Leave me the land I live in, where kind earth
Yields real grain, a hundredfold at a birth;
And purple grapes of every laden vine
Laugh with the girls that tread them into wine.
Glad all life! In the olive, as each day
Ripens its juices ”

“ For all I learned through him of Nature’s law!
If lives stretched for goodness, well might his vie
For an exemption from the rule to die;
Nothing more certain, as his light grew dim,
Than his waiver of it, if pressed on him.
And You make a fuss at death, fret and fume,
When how does your life differ from a tomb?
You rid yourself of half of it in sleep ”

“ Through whom Æneas proudly traced his line.
Here stood showing glorious wounds a band
Of heroes fall’n to save its native land;
Though other arts could equal entrance gain,—
To give life charm, or steal a pang from pain.
Priests too, who as they at the altar stood
Offered pure lives as well as victims’ blood:
And seers, who ne’er falsified Heav’n’s truth,
But spoke as they heard from Apollo’s mouth:—
A various tribe, yet all alike in this,
That, having served, they have deserved their bliss. ”

“ Upon life, is to leave you face to face
With Hell’s Powers, and at their cruel grace.
Dread not; whatever penalties you owe
You will pay to the full, but not Below.
Hell’s horrors are mere bugbears; and, as they,
Shadows from the realities of day;
Warnings as well.
In no drear realm beneath
Wanders Tantalus, with fear-frozen breath
Lest the huge rock shall snap the slender thread, [115]
And thunder down upon his helpless head.
It is a parable. The weight of cares,
The uncertainties in human affairs—
These men attribute to the wrath of God;
Charging Heaven with strokes from Fortune’s rod. ”

“ The life I praise; but ere I knew its charms,
The choir of Muses wooed me to their arms,
Taught me an eager child their sacred lore,
Arts I still love; and fain had taught me more—
To map Heav’n’s paths, number its stars, and trace
Why wanes the moon; when veils the sun his face,
Hastes purple-clad to sink on Ocean’s breast,
And stays Night’s course for him and Man to rest;
Where growling earthquakes breed ”

“ She, yet not herself; breathing not our air;
No mortal accents from a mortal tongue;
Visage, complexion changed, fillet unstrung;
Breast stormily heaving; heart all but broke
In yet untamed resistance to the yoke
The God would fix, to break mind—human birth—
To bind his messenger from Heav’n to Earth;
While She, though pure, adoring, how not repine,
Identity lost, e’en to be Divine!
’Twas instinct in her that rebelled; not she,
The Prophetess, the Sibyl ”

“ How urge men as good as deaf—so, the rule,
Sulky—for no clear gain, to go to school,
When Nature had already, by design
For them, through combining powers, to reign,
Giv’n versatility of voice and tongue
To plan, to act, and drive the world along!
Strength in union; this the great, first law,
From which, and its self-sacrifice, men draw
Sovereignty in Nature; thence learned to bow [135]
To chiefs in mind and heart, who taught them how
To change forms of living and life for new. ”

“ Do the lights vie with the sun’s beams?
Must music to stir hearts to leap and bound,
From frescoed walls and fretted roofs resound? [103]
Or if some time hot fever racks the head,
Are you, tossing on a sick bed,
Easier at all that you chance to lie
On cedarn couch purple with Tyrian dye? [104]
Know you not, wastrels, that what Mind you give
To flesh you steal from power to live?
The spirit is the root of life; thereby
We live; and if we starve it, then we die. ”

“ Wisdom of other men became as night,
His page tracks life to its source; there the whole
Is moulded by this father of the soul.
Mortal being is a medley; but as bees, [118]
Ranging up and down, among flow’rs and trees,
In a woodland glade, sip everywhere,
Scorning nothing suckled by sunny air,
And turn all to honey, so his wise pen
Transmutes words into golden sweets for men.
As his thought wells up from a mind divine,
Terrors bred of animal blood resign
Their hold, world’s walls crumble in dust away,
I see in light clearer than that of day
Earth—above it, through it ”

“ Men’s eyes, and cheat their senses of repose.
Anchises, for whom Space and Time were nought,
Had through the gate of horn Æneas sought
By night on the Etruscan sea; he now
With last words, and many a longing vow
Of love, confessed his child was due to part—
Though truer no Son, kinder no Sire’s heart—
By the ivory door; the horn gate stood
Fast locked and sealed against all flesh and blood.
Though soul there—a thistle-down Man, wind-tost
With life; a night-mare; less real than a ghost! ”

“ Not his hives to fail in queen bees; no swarm
Of his was ever known to come to harm;
Earliest the honey from his combs pressed;
For who judged like him which flow’rs bees love best?
Master the old man in tree-craft as well;
His, choicest stone-pines, limes; for he could tell
By instinct where to plant; and as for yield
Of fruit, spring’s promise autumn aye fulfilled!
He planted, and transplanted, as he chose
Full-grown elms, hardwood pears, plum-grafted sloes;
Even a leafy plane he dared to move—
Nor hurt—to a fresh home within the grove. [28]
Two thousand years ago the old man died ”

“ From accidents of fortune’s blind caprice!
Folly again, when banqueters recline,
Brows roses-wreathed, cups in their hands, the wine [109]
At their hearts, and—“brief harvest this of joy
For us poor things”, they cry; “the hour employ!
What is is ours; for use; not to recall!”
As if of death’s ills, if any, of all
Chief were to think of feasting in the past,
Feel in the hand the wine cup, and not taste! [110]
Mere slumber will the night from day divide,
And brush life’s merriment and cares aside. ”

“ You tell by a steed’s neigh that mares are nigh; [134]
Straightway he feels the spur of wingéd love;
They interpret his challenge to the drove.
But—nostrils spread, the neigh become a snort;
War steeds, jangling armour, pass—he would join the sport!
Nor are birds, ospreys, gulls, without their choice
Of vents for feeling; all unlike the voice,
In wooing, to the hunger-scream of strife,
Or victor’s, grappling sea fish for its life.
Even, it is believed, some kinds that ride
The air have means by varied cries to guide
Men’s acts. ”

“ A horse is full-grown and all burdens bears;
At that age a boy can but play, and rest;
Yearns aloud in sleep for his mother’s breast.
Hardly is life for the young man begun
When the wind-galled steed’s course long since was run. ”

“ Is that fancy paints future torments worse.
The Wise assure him Hell is not; in vain;
Life, his, is Hell; Eternity of pain.
To wrongdoers and wronged too brief a space
Human life has seemed to avenge a race
On heinous crimes against it; hence rose Dis,
Balanced by Elysian fields of bliss.
But you, the Multitude, why are you sad
That life is short, you, neither good, nor bad? ”

“ All hues and fragrances, to be trod by the Queen of Love.
Next enters red-hot Summer; but its droughts are lightly borne
By good Goddess Ceres; for they ripen the standing corn
Nought ashamed is She of the dusty sweat upon her brow.
Foreseeing her sheaves, how more and heavier they shall grow;
Nor even scolds the North-wind; it steels the straw to sustain,
By its rough embraces, the weight of the hardening grain. ”

“ Tempting rash herb-collectors to their doom;
But Nature, kind in that which She denies,
Kind above all whenever She allies
With human effort.—
Mark how She has filled
The vales with rocks that cry: “Come, take, and build!”
How, to crown the work, She has bid beside
Each citadel’s sheer walls a river glide.
No Libyan desert ours, but a land
Of many streams, where in cool shadows stand
Knee-deep the still kine; and of lakes good store,
Como’s to Garda’s sea-imitating roar;
Of highways for her navies, east and west,
To circulate, world-through, Rome’s high behest ”

“ Beyond the circle where they were life’s charm.
How could a father keep a heart of stone,
When he felt a child’s throbbing on his own?
Tenderness breeds tenderness; men at length
Recognized binding duties owed by strength
To weakness—assuming what it has willed
Must be done—in the stammer of a child
Dictating to its father. From the hearth
Sympathy with helplessness spread through Earth. ”

“ To be of those whom Lethe should wash clear
Of all they once had been, and all they were:—
That Elysium’s a waiting-room for life;
Life a dust-heap for trials, failures, strife [78]
That men are Shadows all, expecting doom,
Whether flesh, or to shift it in a tomb. ”

“ Resolved throughout of one thing—ne’er, from haste
In clutching popular applause, to waste
A chance on Fortune’s wheel for his Rome’s Shield
To foil War’s cross-eyed Master in the field;
And, near to him, in Britomart’s royal spoils,—
Like a brave boar, trapped in a huntsman’s toils, [85]
Unconquerable else—the battle’s lord—
Confess it, Gaul, Carthage, and Syracuse—Rome’s Sword!
But who is this, Thou askest, in the pride
Of arms and youth, advancing by his side?
Thou mark’st the likeness; well might he be son:
From the same stock he springs, a noble one. ”

“ Than Earth’s; for the lower world owes no debt
To sun or stars with which our skies are set;
It has them of its own, as real as ours.
Real too its grass, the fragrance of its flow’rs;
Real they to Spirit as to them It seems,
Though for mortals unsubstantial as are dreams.
On turf or yellow sand some test the skill,
That earned them fame in life; and is theirs still.
The woods are full of revellers, who beat
Time to gay dancers and their flying feet ”

“ More Divine in Heav’n above!
Ev’n when babyhood becomes boyhood, still
Nature spreads her bounty in sheer good-will.
Honey from the sturdy oak, like dew, drips;
Briers press purple grapes on thirsting lips;
And from unploughed fields are borne
Yellow sheaves of beardless corn.
But stifle human wants with plenty, lust
Of unneighbourliness creeps from the dust.
Merchants here and there about ocean roam,
Snatching subsistence given free at home;
Robbers build forts whence to spoil;
Shares rend the protesting soil. ”