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Book 5
On the Nature of Things · 83 chapters- 1PROEM
- 2That man doth justly seem to us a god,
- 3Of all those monsters slain, even if alive,
- 4And walking now
- 5And use the varied speech from man to man;
- 6Before all else, the seas, the lands, the sky:
- 7Reason, O rather than the fact itself,
- 8For sure 'tis quite beside the mark to think
- 9Likewise, thou canst ne'er
- 10Is verily--to dote. Our gratefulness,
- 11So that they knew and pre-conceived with mind
- 12So great the faults it stands encumbered with.
- 13Destroys, or flaws of winds with furious whirl
- 14And first,
- 15Some certain parts of earth, grievously parched
- 16The burly winds (that over-sweep amain)
- 17The abounding well-spring of the liquid light,
- 18Are so alive, that thus the light ne'er leaves
- 19Of finite time?--for they would never fall
- 20The nature of our universe, and had
- 21Had then assailed them, far and wide they would
- 22But not of solid body, as I've shown,
- 23Aroused in an all unholy war,
- 24But the omnipotent Father in keen wrath
- 25ASTRONOMICAL QUESTIONS
- 26In that long-ago
- 27First came together the earthy particles
- 28Beneath the heavens. And thuswise ether too,
- 29Upon its outer edges (so that then,
- 30Mingles its liquid body. It doth leave
- 31Though often far lighter. For to such degree
- 32With heavy body, as air is with the earth
- 33Whileth the driven fires, or, then, because
- 34Is nothing shrunken. Therefore, since the heat
- 35Only the least, when more or less away,
- 36Only by little particles of heat--
- 37In under-regions, and the sun is thus
- 38Even to the heat-fraught regions and the signs
- 39Under the lands, aspires to seize the sky,
- 40Causes have ever worked in such a way,
- 41With oblique light--as men declare to us
- 42Hath there observed his setting; thence likewise
- 43The Babylonian doctrine of Chaldees,
- 44Lord Bacchus, and then other Seasons too
- 45That quench and kill his fires, why could not he
- 46With open eye survey all regions wide,
- 47Out of sea-pools of salt. How true remains,
- 48Like unto milk; even as a woman now
- 49To transformation. Lo, this moulders down,
- 50Or to find aliment, or to intertwine
- 51However, and every kind begot from seed
- 52Flowers in his prime of vigour; but the boy
- 53Of flesh and blood existing in the lands,
- 54The divers kinds of grasses and the grains
- 55To them had given, what earth of own accord
- 56But huddled in groves, and mountain-caves, and woods,
- 57Nor would they call with lamentations loud
- 58Even as he viewed his living flesh entombed
- 59They give the drafts to others.
- 60And propagation never could have brought
- 61Would men more strong in sense, more wise in heart,
- 62They reach them, envy like the thunderbolt
- 63Succumbed, whilst each man sought unto himself
- 64Old secrets and the sins.
- 65To do the same? And, if the rest had not
- 66Huge flabby jowls of mad Molossian hounds,
- 67As long-lived generations of the crows
- 68Bodies of wondrous growth. And, thus, to these
- 69To roll along--moon, day, and night, and night's
- 70And into our thought there come the journeyings
- 71Lest for aught foully done or madly said
- 72The conflagrations burned the forest trees
- 73Then would it enter their heads how these same lumps,
- 74Now, Memmius,
- 75And yoked pairs abreast came earlier
- 76Now here, now there; and whoso came apace
- 77And various of the wild beasts fled apart
- 78For all the male kind far excels in skill,
- 79Marking the plotted landscape; even as now
- 80A big tree's branches, merrily they'd refresh
- 81If theretofore naught sweeter we have known--
- 82Make shift with some mean garment of the Plebs.
- 83On what has gone before, except where reason