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Book 6
On the Nature of Things · 72 chapters- 1PROEM
- 2Spoilt from within,--in part, because he saw
- 3Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
- 4For even those men who have learned full well
- 5Nor wilt thou enter with a serene breast
- 6And think divinities are working there.
- 7A sound on high, as linen-awning, stretched
- 8And, there enclosed, ever more and more
- 9Give, as they roughly break, a rumbling roar;
- 10Likewise, it lightens, when the clouds have struck,
- 11And set ablaze all objects,--verily
- 12In gathered storm have filled utterly,
- 13Likewise, it lightens also when the clouds
- 14Upon the instant bronze and gold; and makes,
- 15As all begotten in those crasser clouds
- 16O'erwhelm the lands with such a massy dark,
- 17Repeated touch of fire. Thereafter, when
- 18With a ripe thunderbolt. And when that wind
- 19And, simultaneously, from out that thing
- 20Hurled from the powerful Roman catapults.
- 21In coming along, it pulls from out the air
- 22The divers causes of the thunderbolt
- 23It maketh each effect, and not, O not
- 24Doth he himself allow it, nor spare the same
- 25Clap upon clap, when skies are cloudless all?
- 26Upon the seas pushed downward--gradually,
- 27Into being
- 28As we up-climb high mountains, proveth clear
- 29And infinite the sum of the Abyss,
- 30Besides, the clouds take in from time to time
- 31And clouds on clouds and racks on racks outstream
- 32Is full of windy caverns all about;
- 33Within it ceases to be rocked about
- 34Then back she sways; and after tottering
- 35Of the wild air and fury-force of wind
- 36*****
- 37Oft in a single night the highways dried
- 38Of neighbouring clans, what time they saw afar
- 39Of things innumerable be seeds enough,
- 40But now I will unfold
- 41*****
- 42Often and oft he waters Aegypt o'er,
- 43They're massed and powerfully pressed. Again,
- 44But evermore they flee--yet not from wrath
- 45And know, these all thus rise from out the earth--
- 46There is, again, on Helicon's high hills
- 47When men pursue the veins of silver and gold,
- 48And then thereafter, when they're once down-fallen
- 49Within the earth. Further, when all the earth
- 50On this account, when night with dew-fraught shades
- 51Because full many seeds of heat there be
- 52A moment since, it catches fire before
- 53A mind and ears attent.
- 54For many things, yet for this very thing
- 55With reason, since there's naught that's fashioned not
- 56Though unto us the mire be filth most foul,
- 57Of verity, the nature of these same paths,
- 58From out the iron collect in larger throng
- 59Into the vacuum; for of verity,
- 60Hath seized upon and held possession of
- 61To one another adapt. Thou seest, first,
- 62Of this thing to the solid parts of that,
- 63Are by the strangeness of the clime and waters
- 64Slowly, and everything upon their way
- 65Whilom reduced the plains to dead men's bones,
- 66And anxious anguish and ululation (mixed
- 67A goodly shower seem like to scanty drops.
- 68In rigid death. And by about the eighth
- 69Would or spring back, scurrying to escape
- 70As though but woolly flocks and horned herds;
- 71Began to sicken, and their bodies would lie
- 72All holy temples, too, of deities