De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

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

  1. Besides all this,
  2. If there had been no origin-in-birth
  3. Of lands and sky, and they had ever been
  4. The everlasting, why, ere Theban war
  5. And obsequies of Troy, have other bards
  6. Not also chanted other high affairs?
  7. Whither have sunk so oft so many deeds
  8. Of heroes? Why do those deeds live no more,
  9. Ingrafted in eternal monuments
  10. Of glory? Verily, I guess, because
  11. The Sum is new, and of a recent date
  12. The nature of our universe, and had
  13. Not long ago its own exordium.
  14. Wherefore, even now some arts are being still
  15. Refined, still increased: now unto ships
  16. Is being added many a new device;
  17. And but the other day musician-folk
  18. Gave birth to melic sounds of organing;
  19. And, then, this nature, this account of things
  20. Hath been discovered latterly, and I
  21. Myself have been discovered only now,
  22. As first among the first, able to turn
  23. The same into ancestral Roman speech.
  24. Yet if, percase, thou deemest that ere this
  25. Existed all things even the same, but that
  26. Perished the cycles of the human race
  27. In fiery exhalations, or cities fell
  28. By some tremendous quaking of the world,
  29. Or rivers in fury, after constant rains,
  30. Had plunged forth across the lands of earth
  31. And whelmed the towns- then, all the more must thou
  32. Confess, defeated by the argument,
  33. That there shall be annihilation too
  34. Of lands and sky. For at a time when things
  35. Were being taxed by maladies so great,
  36. And so great perils, if some cause more fell
  37. Had then assailed them, far and wide they would
  38. Have gone to disaster and supreme collapse.
  39. And by no other reasoning are we
  40. Seen to be mortal, save that all of us
  41. Sicken in turn with those same maladies
  42. With which have sickened in the past those men
  43. Whom nature hath removed from life.