De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

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

  1. Arises, too, this same great earth-quaking,
  2. When wind and some prodigious force of air,
  3. Collected from without or down within
  4. The old telluric deeps, have hurled themselves
  5. Amain into those caverns sub-terrene,
  6. And there at first tumultuously chafe
  7. Among the vasty grottos, borne about
  8. In mad rotations, till their lashed force
  9. Aroused out-bursts abroad, and then and there,
  10. Riving the deep earth, makes a mighty chasm-
  11. What once in Syrian Sidon did befall,
  12. And once in Peloponnesian Aegium,
  13. Twain cities which such out-break of wild air
  14. And earth's convulsion, following hard upon,
  15. O'erthrew of old. And many a walled town,
  16. Besides, hath fall'n by such omnipotent
  17. Convulsions on the land, and in the sea
  18. Engulfed hath sunken many a city down
  19. With all its populace. But if, indeed,
  20. They burst not forth, yet is the very rush
  21. Of the wild air and fury-force of wind
  22. Then dissipated, like an ague-fit,
  23. Through the innumerable pores of earth,
  24. To set her all a-shake- even as a chill,
  25. When it hath gone into our marrow-bones,
  26. Sets us convulsively, despite ourselves,
  27. A-shivering and a-shaking. Therefore, men
  28. With two-fold terror bustle in alarm
  29. Through cities to and fro: they fear the roofs
  30. Above the head; and underfoot they dread
  31. The caverns, lest the nature of the earth
  32. Suddenly rend them open, and she gape,
  33. Herself asunder, with tremendous maw,
  34. And, all confounded, seek to chock it full
  35. With her own ruins. Let men, then, go on
  36. Feigning at will that heaven and earth shall be
  37. Inviolable, entrusted evermore
  38. To an eternal weal: and yet at times
  39. The very force of danger here at hand
  40. Prods them on some side with this goad of fear-
  41. This among others- that the earth, withdrawn
  42. Abruptly from under their feet, be hurried down,
  43. Down into the abyss, and the Sum-of-Things
  44. Be following after, utterly fordone,
  45. Till be but wrack and wreckage of a world.
  46. . . . . . .