De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

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

  1. 'Twas such a manner of disease, 'twas such
  2. Mortal miasma in Cecropian lands
  3. Whilom reduced the plains to dead men's bones,
  4. Unpeopled the highways, drained of citizens
  5. The Athenian town. For coming from afar,
  6. Rising in lands of Aegypt, traversing
  7. Reaches of air and floating fields of foam,
  8. At last on all Pandion's folk it swooped;
  9. Whereat by troops unto disease and death
  10. Were they o'er-given. At first, they'd bear about
  11. A skull on fire with heat, and eyeballs twain
  12. Red with suffusion of blank glare. Their throats,
  13. Black on the inside, sweated oozy blood;
  14. And the walled pathway of the voice of man
  15. Was clogged with ulcers; and the very tongue,
  16. The mind's interpreter, would trickle gore,
  17. Weakened by torments, tardy, rough to touch.
  18. Next when that Influence of bane had chocked,
  19. Down through the throat, the breast, and streamed had
  20. E'en into sullen heart of those sick folk,
  21. Then, verily, all the fences of man's life
  22. Began to topple. From the mouth the breath
  23. Would roll a noisome stink, as stink to heaven
  24. Rotting cadavers flung unburied out.
  25. And, lo, thereafter, all the body's strength
  26. And every power of mind would languish, now
  27. In very doorway of destruction.
  28. And anxious anguish and ululation (mixed
  29. With many a groan) companioned alway
  30. The intolerable torments. Night and day,
  31. Recurrent spasms of vomiting would rack
  32. Alway their thews and members, breaking down
  33. With sheer exhaustion men already spent.
  34. And yet on no one's body couldst thou mark
  35. The skin with o'er-much heat to burn aglow,
  36. But rather the body unto touch of hands
  37. Would offer a warmish feeling, and thereby
  38. Show red all over, with ulcers, so to say,
  39. Inbranded, like the "sacred fires" o'erspread
  40. Along the members. The inward parts of men,
  41. In truth, would blaze unto the very bones;
  42. A flame, like flame in furnaces, would blaze
  43. Within the stomach. Nor couldst aught apply
  44. Unto their members light enough and thin
  45. For shift of aid- but coolness and a breeze
  46. Ever and ever. Some would plunge those limbs
  47. On fire with bane into the icy streams,
  48. Hurling the body naked into the waves;