De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

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

  1. But night o'erwhelms the lands with vasty murk
  2. Either when sun, after his diurnal course,
  3. Hath walked the ultimate regions of the sky
  4. And wearily hath panted forth his fires,
  5. Shivered by their long journeying and wasted
  6. By traversing the multitudinous air,
  7. Or else because the self-same force that drave
  8. His orb along above the lands compels
  9. Him then to turn his course beneath the lands.
  10. Matuta also at a fixed hour
  11. Spreadeth the roseate morning out along
  12. The coasts of heaven and deploys the light,
  13. Either because the self-same sun, returning
  14. Under the lands, aspires to seize the sky,
  15. Striving to set it blazing with his rays
  16. Ere he himself appear, or else because
  17. Fires then will congregate and many seeds
  18. Of heat are wont, even at a fixed time,
  19. To stream together- gendering evermore
  20. New suns and light. Just so the story goes
  21. That from the Idaean mountain-tops are seen
  22. Dispersed fires upon the break of day
  23. Which thence combine, as 'twere, into one ball
  24. And form an orb. Nor yet in these affairs
  25. Is aught for wonder that these seeds of fire
  26. Can thus together stream at time so fixed
  27. And shape anew the splendour of the sun.
  28. For many facts we see which come to pass
  29. At fixed time in all things: burgeon shrubs
  30. At fixed time, and at a fixed time
  31. They cast their flowers; and Eld commands the teeth,
  32. At time as surely fixed, to drop away,
  33. And Youth commands the growing boy to bloom
  34. With the soft down and let from both his cheeks
  35. The soft beard fall. And lastly, thunder-bolts,
  36. Snow, rains, clouds, winds, at seasons of the year
  37. Nowise unfixed, all do come to pass.
  38. For where, even from their old primordial start
  39. Causes have ever worked in such a way,
  40. And where, even from the world's first origin,
  41. Thuswise have things befallen, so even now
  42. After a fixed order they come round
  43. In sequence also.