BOOK II

PROEM

 
     'Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds
     Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
     To watch another's labouring anguish far,
     Not that we joyously delight that man
     Should thus be smitten, but because 'tis sweet
     To mark what evils we ourselves be spared;
     'Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
     Of armies embattled yonder o'er the plains,
     Ourselves no sharers in the peril; but naught
     There is more goodly than to hold the high
     Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise,
     Whence thou may'st look below on other men
     And see them ev'rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed
     In their lone seeking for the road of life;
     Rivals in genius, or emulous in rank,
     Pressing through days and nights with hugest toil
     For summits of power and mastery of the world.
     O wretched minds of men! O blinded hearts!
     In how great perils, in what darks of life
     Are spent the human years, however brief!—
     O not to see that nature for herself
     Barks after nothing, save that pain keep off,
     Disjoined from the body, and that mind enjoy
     Delightsome feeling, far from care and fear!
     Therefore we see that our corporeal life
     Needs little, altogether, and only such
     As takes the pain away, and can besides
     Strew underneath some number of delights.
     More grateful 'tis at times (for nature craves
     No artifice nor luxury), if forsooth
     There be no golden images of boys
     Along the halls, with right hands holding out
     The lamps ablaze, the lights for evening feasts,
     And if the house doth glitter not with gold
     Nor gleam with silver, and to the lyre resound
     No fretted and gilded ceilings overhead,
     Yet still to lounge with friends in the soft grass
     Beside a river of water, underneath
     A big tree's boughs, and merrily to refresh
     Our frames, with no vast outlay—most of all
     If the weather is laughing and the times of the year
     Besprinkle the green of the grass around with flowers.
     Nor yet the quicker will hot fevers go,
     If on a pictured tapestry thou toss,
     Or purple robe, than if 'tis thine to lie
     Upon the poor man's bedding. Wherefore, since
     Treasure, nor rank, nor glory of a reign
     Avail us naught for this our body, thus
     Reckon them likewise nothing for the mind:
     Save then perchance, when thou beholdest forth
     Thy legions swarming round the Field of Mars,
     Rousing a mimic warfare—either side
     Strengthened with large auxiliaries and horse,
     Alike equipped with arms, alike inspired;
     Or save when also thou beholdest forth
     Thy fleets to swarm, deploying down the sea:
     For then, by such bright circumstance abashed,
     Religion pales and flees thy mind; O then
     The fears of death leave heart so free of care.
     But if we note how all this pomp at last
     Is but a drollery and a mocking sport,
     And of a truth man's dread, with cares at heels,
     Dreads not these sounds of arms, these savage swords
     But among kings and lords of all the world
     Mingles undaunted, nor is overawed
     By gleam of gold nor by the splendour bright
     Of purple robe, canst thou then doubt that this
     Is aught, but power of thinking?—when, besides
     The whole of life but labours in the dark.
     For just as children tremble and fear all
     In the viewless dark, so even we at times
     Dread in the light so many things that be
     No whit more fearsome than what children feign,
     Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark.
     This terror then, this darkness of the mind,
     Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
     Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
     But only nature's aspect and her law.
 

ATOMIC MOTIONS

 
     Now come: I will untangle for thy steps
     Now by what motions the begetting bodies
     Of the world-stuff beget the varied world,
     And then forever resolve it when begot,
     And by what force they are constrained to this,
     And what the speed appointed unto them
     Wherewith to travel down the vast inane:
     Do thou remember to yield thee to my words.
     For truly matter coheres not, crowds not tight,
     Since we behold each thing to wane away,
     And we observe how all flows on and off,
     As 'twere, with age-old time, and from our eyes
     How eld withdraws each object at the end,
     Albeit the sum is seen to bide the same,
     Unharmed, because these motes that leave each thing
     Diminish what they part from, but endow
     With increase those to which in turn they come,
     Constraining these to wither in old age,
     And those to flower at the prime (and yet
     Biding not long among them). Thus the sum
     Forever is replenished, and we live
     As mortals by eternal give and take.
     The nations wax, the nations wane away;
     In a brief space the generations pass,
     And like to runners hand the lamp of life
     One unto other.
 
 
                          But if thou believe
     That the primordial germs of things can stop,
     And in their stopping give new motions birth,
     Afar thou wanderest from the road of truth.
     For since they wander through the void inane,
     All the primordial germs of things must needs
     Be borne along, either by weight their own,
     Or haply by another's blow without.
     For, when, in their incessancy so oft
     They meet and clash, it comes to pass amain
     They leap asunder, face to face: not strange—
     Being most hard, and solid in their weights,
     And naught opposing motion, from behind.
     And that more clearly thou perceive how all
     These mites of matter are darted round about,
     Recall to mind how nowhere in the sum
     Of All exists a bottom,—nowhere is
     A realm of rest for primal bodies; since
     (As amply shown and proved by reason sure)
     Space has no bound nor measure, and extends
     Unmetered forth in all directions round.
     Since this stands certain, thus 'tis out of doubt
     No rest is rendered to the primal bodies
     Along the unfathomable inane; but rather,
     Inveterately plied by motions mixed,
     Some, at their jamming, bound aback and leave
     Huge gaps between, and some from off the blow
     Are hurried about with spaces small between.
     And all which, brought together with slight gaps,
     In more condensed union bound aback,
     Linked by their own all inter-tangled shapes,—
     These form the irrefragable roots of rocks
     And the brute bulks of iron, and what else
     Is of their kind…
     The rest leap far asunder, far recoil,
     Leaving huge gaps between: and these supply
     For us thin air and splendour-lights of the sun.
     And many besides wander the mighty void—
     Cast back from unions of existing things,
     Nowhere accepted in the universe,
     And nowise linked in motions to the rest.
     And of this fact (as I record it here)
     An image, a type goes on before our eyes
     Present each moment; for behold whenever
     The sun's light and the rays, let in, pour down
     Across dark halls of houses: thou wilt see
     The many mites in many a manner mixed
     Amid a void in the very light of the rays,
     And battling on, as in eternal strife,
     And in battalions contending without halt,
     In meetings, partings, harried up and down.
     From this thou mayest conjecture of what sort
     The ceaseless tossing of primordial seeds
     Amid the mightier void—at least so far
     As small affair can for a vaster serve,
     And by example put thee on the spoor
     Of knowledge. For this reason too 'tis fit
     Thou turn thy mind the more unto these bodies
     Which here are witnessed tumbling in the light:
     Namely, because such tumblings are a sign
     That motions also of the primal stuff
     Secret and viewless lurk beneath, behind.
     For thou wilt mark here many a speck, impelled
     By viewless blows, to change its little course,
     And beaten backwards to return again,
     Hither and thither in all directions round.
     Lo, all their shifting movement is of old,
     From the primeval atoms; for the same
     Primordial seeds of things first move of self,
     And then those bodies built of unions small
     And nearest, as it were, unto the powers
     Of the primeval atoms, are stirred up
     By impulse of those atoms' unseen blows,
     And these thereafter goad the next in size:
     Thus motion ascends from the primevals on,
     And stage by stage emerges to our sense,
     Until those objects also move which we
     Can mark in sunbeams, though it not appears
     What blows do urge them.
 
 
                             Herein wonder not
     How 'tis that, while the seeds of things are all
     Moving forever, the sum yet seems to stand
     Supremely still, except in cases where
     A thing shows motion of its frame as whole.
     For far beneath the ken of senses lies
     The nature of those ultimates of the world;
     And so, since those themselves thou canst not see,
     Their motion also must they veil from men—
     For mark, indeed, how things we can see, oft
     Yet hide their motions, when afar from us
     Along the distant landscape. Often thus,
     Upon a hillside will the woolly flocks
     Be cropping their goodly food and creeping about
     Whither the summons of the grass, begemmed
     With the fresh dew, is calling, and the lambs,
     Well filled, are frisking, locking horns in sport:
     Yet all for us seem blurred and blent afar—
     A glint of white at rest on a green hill.
     Again, when mighty legions, marching round,
     Fill all the quarters of the plains below,
     Rousing a mimic warfare, there the sheen
     Shoots up the sky, and all the fields about
     Glitter with brass, and from beneath, a sound
     Goes forth from feet of stalwart soldiery,
     And mountain walls, smote by the shouting, send
     The voices onward to the stars of heaven,
     And hither and thither darts the cavalry,
     And of a sudden down the midmost fields
     Charges with onset stout enough to rock
     The solid earth: and yet some post there is
     Up the high mountains, viewed from which they seem
     To stand—a gleam at rest along the plains.