Georgics

Virgil

Vergil. The Poems of Vergil. Rhoades, James, translator. London: Oxford University Press, 1921.

  1. First, nature's law
  2. For generating trees is manifold;
  3. For some of their own force spontaneous spring,
  4. No hand of man compelling, and possess
  5. The plains and river-windings far and wide,
  6. As pliant osier and the bending broom,
  7. Poplar, and willows in wan companies
  8. With green leaf glimmering gray; and some there be
  9. From chance-dropped seed that rear them, as the tall
  10. Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood,
  11. Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular
  12. Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth
  13. A forest of dense suckers from the root,
  14. As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant,
  15. Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots
  16. The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes
  17. Nature imparted first; hence all the race
  18. Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves
  19. Springs into verdure. Other means there are,
  20. Which use by method for itself acquired.
  21. One, sliving suckers from the tender frame
  22. Of the tree-mother, plants them in the trench;
  23. One buries the bare stumps within his field,
  24. Truncheons cleft four-wise, or sharp-pointed stakes;
  25. Some forest-trees the layer's bent arch await,
  26. And slips yet quick within the parent-soil;
  27. No root need others, nor doth the pruner's hand
  28. Shrink to restore the topmost shoot to earth
  29. That gave it being. Nay, marvellous to tell,
  30. Lopped of its limbs, the olive, a mere stock,
  31. Still thrusts its root out from the sapless wood,
  32. And oft the branches of one kind we see
  33. Change to another's with no loss to rue,
  34. Pear-tree transformed the ingrafted apple yield,
  35. And stony cornels on the plum-tree blush.