Nature of Things | Page 4

being at the centre hid. And for the rest, summon to
judgments true, Unbusied ears and singleness of mind Withdrawn from

cares; lest these my gifts, arranged For thee with eager service, thou
disdain Before thou comprehendest: since for thee I prove the supreme
law of Gods and sky, And the primordial germs of things unfold,
Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies And fosters all, and whither
she resolves Each in the end when each is overthrown. This ultimate
stock we have devised to name Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,
Or primal bodies, as primal to the world. I fear perhaps thou deemest
that we fare An impious road to realms of thought profane; But 'tis that
same religion oftener far Hath bred the foul impieties of men: As once
at Aulis, the elected chiefs, Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen, With Agamemnon's daughter,
foully slain. She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks And fillets,
fluttering down on either cheek, And at the altar marked her grieving
sire, The priests beside him who concealed the knife, And all the folk
in tears at sight of her. With a dumb terror and a sinking knee She
dropped; nor might avail her now that first 'Twas she who gave the
king a father's name. They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
On to the altar- hither led not now With solemn rites and hymeneal
choir, But sinless woman, sinfully foredone, A parent felled her on her
bridal day, Making his child a sacrificial beast To give the ships
auspicious winds for Troy: Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.
And there shall come the time when even thou, Forced by the
soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek To break from us. Ah, many a
dream even now Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life, And trouble
all thy fortunes with base fears. I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong By some device
unconquered to withstand Religions and the menacings of seers. But
now nor skill nor instrument is theirs, Since men must dread eternal
pains in death. For what the soul may be they do not know, Whether 'tis
born, or enter in at birth, And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,
Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves Of Orcus, or by some divine
decree Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang, Who first from lovely
Helicon brought down A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,
Renowned forever among the Italian clans. Yet Ennius too in
everlasting verse Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be, Though
thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare, But only phantom figures,
strangely wan, And tells how once from out those regions rose Old

Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears And with his words unfolded
Nature's source. Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp The purport
of the skies- the law behind The wandering courses of the sun and
moon; To scan the powers that speed all life below; But most to see
with reasonable eyes Of what the mind, of what the soul is made, And
what it is so terrible that breaks On us asleep, or waking in disease,
Until we seem to mark and hear at hand Dead men whose bones earth
bosomed long ago. SUBSTANCE IS ETERNAL
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, Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:
Nothing from nothing ever yet was born. Fear holds dominion over
mortality Only because, seeing in land and sky So much the cause
whereof no wise they know, Men think Divinities are working there.
Meantime, when once we know from nothing still Nothing can be
create, we shall divine More clearly what we seek: those elements
From which alone all things created are, And how accomplished by no
tool of Gods. Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind Might take
its origin from any thing, No fixed seed required. Men from the sea
Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed, And, fowl full fledged
come bursting from the sky; The horned cattle, the herds and all the
wild Would haunt with varying offspring tilth and waste; Nor would
the same fruits keep their olden trees, But each might grow from any
stock or limb By chance and change. Indeed, and were there not For
each its procreant atoms, could things have Each its unalterable mother
old? But, since produced from fixed seeds are all, Each birth goes forth
upon the shores of light From its own stuff, from its