De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. William Ellery Leonard. E. P. Dutton. 1916.

  1. Therefore death to us
  2. Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least,
  3. Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.
  4. And just as in the ages gone before
  5. We felt no touch of ill, when all sides round
  6. To battle came the Carthaginian host,
  7. And the times, shaken by tumultuous war,
  8. Under the aery coasts of arching heaven
  9. Shuddered and trembled, and all humankind
  10. Doubted to which the empery should fall
  11. By land and sea, thus when we are no more,
  12. When comes that sundering of our body and soul
  13. Through which we're fashioned to a single state,
  14. Verily naught to us, us then no more,
  15. Can come to pass, naught move our senses then-
  16. No, not if earth confounded were with sea,
  17. And sea with heaven. But if indeed do feel
  18. The nature of mind and energy of soul,
  19. After their severance from this body of ours,
  20. Yet nothing 'tis to us who in the bonds
  21. And wedlock of the soul and body live,
  22. Through which we're fashioned to a single state.
  23. And, even if time collected after death
  24. The matter of our frames and set it all
  25. Again in place as now, and if again
  26. To us the light of life were given, O yet
  27. That process too would not concern us aught,
  28. When once the self-succession of our sense
  29. Has been asunder broken. And now and here,
  30. Little enough we're busied with the selves
  31. We were aforetime, nor, concerning them,
  32. Suffer a sore distress. For shouldst thou gaze
  33. Backwards across all yesterdays of time
  34. The immeasurable, thinking how manifold
  35. The motions of matter are, then couldst thou well
  36. Credit this too: often these very seeds
  37. (From which we are to-day) of old were set
  38. In the same order as they are to-day-
  39. Yet this we can't to consciousness recall
  40. Through the remembering mind. For there hath been
  41. An interposed pause of life, and wide
  42. Have all the motions wandered everywhere
  43. From these our senses. For if woe and ail
  44. Perchance are toward, then the man to whom
  45. The bane can happen must himself be there
  46. At that same time. But death precludeth this,
  47. Forbidding life to him on whom might crowd
  48. Such irk and care; and granted 'tis to know:
  49. Nothing for us there is to dread in death,
  50. No wretchedness for him who is no more,
  51. The same estate as if ne'er born before,
  52. When death immortal hath ta'en the mortal life.
  1. Hence, where thou seest a man to grieve because
  2. When dead he rots with body laid away,
  3. Or perishes in flames or jaws of beasts,
  4. Know well: he rings not true, and that beneath
  5. Still works an unseen sting upon his heart,
  6. However he deny that he believes.
  7. His shall be aught of feeling after death.
  8. For he, I fancy, grants not what he says,
  9. Nor what that presupposes, and he fails
  10. To pluck himself with all his roots from life
  11. And cast that self away, quite unawares
  12. Feigning that some remainder's left behind.
  13. For when in life one pictures to oneself
  14. His body dead by beasts and vultures torn,
  15. He pities his state, dividing not himself
  16. Therefrom, removing not the self enough
  17. From the body flung away, imagining
  18. Himself that body, and projecting there
  19. His own sense, as he stands beside it: hence
  20. He grieves that he is mortal born, nor marks
  21. That in true death there is no second self
  22. Alive and able to sorrow for self destroyed,
  23. Or stand lamenting that the self lies there
  24. Mangled or burning. For if it an evil is
  25. Dead to be jerked about by jaw and fang
  26. Of the wild brutes, I see not why 'twere not
  27. Bitter to lie on fires and roast in flames,
  28. Or suffocate in honey, and, reclined
  29. On the smooth oblong of an icy slab,
  30. Grow stiff in cold, or sink with load of earth
  31. Down-crushing from above.