The Georgics [English] | Page 8

the ocean-plains,?And dogs obscene, and birds of evil bode?Gave tokens. Yea, how often have we seen?Etna, her furnace-walls asunder riven,?In billowy floods boil o'er the Cyclops' fields,?And roll down globes of fire and molten rocks!?A clash of arms through all the heaven was heard?By Germany; strange heavings shook the Alps.?Yea, and by many through the breathless groves?A voice was heard with power, and wondrous-pale?Phantoms were seen upon the dusk of night,?And cattle spake, portentous! streams stand still,?And the earth yawns asunder, ivory weeps?For sorrow in the shrines, and bronzes sweat.?Up-twirling forests with his eddying tide,?Madly he bears them down, that lord of floods,?Eridanus, till through all the plain are swept?Beasts and their stalls together. At that time?In gloomy entrails ceased not to appear?Dark-threatening fibres, springs to trickle blood,?And high-built cities night-long to resound?With the wolves' howling. Never more than then?From skies all cloudless fell the thunderbolts,?Nor blazed so oft the comet's fire of bale.?Therefore a second time Philippi saw?The Roman hosts with kindred weapons rush?To battle, nor did the high gods deem it hard?That twice Emathia and the wide champaign?Of Haemus should be fattening with our blood.?Ay, and the time will come when there anigh,?Heaving the earth up with his curved plough,?Some swain will light on javelins by foul rust?Corroded, or with ponderous harrow strike?On empty helmets, while he gapes to see?Bones as of giants from the trench untombed.?Gods of my country, heroes of the soil,?And Romulus, and Mother Vesta, thou?Who Tuscan Tiber and Rome's Palatine?Preservest, this new champion at the least?Our fallen generation to repair?Forbid not. To the full and long ago?Our blood thy Trojan perjuries hath paid,?Laomedon. Long since the courts of heaven?Begrudge us thee, our Caesar, and complain?That thou regard'st the triumphs of mankind,?Here where the wrong is right, the right is wrong,?Where wars abound so many, and myriad-faced?Is crime; where no meet honour hath the plough;?The fields, their husbandmen led far away,?Rot in neglect, and curved pruning-hooks?Into the sword's stiff blade are fused and forged.?Euphrates here, here Germany new strife?Is stirring; neighbouring cities are in arms,?The laws that bound them snapped; and godless war?Rages through all the universe; as when?The four-horse chariots from the barriers poured?Still quicken o'er the course, and, idly now?Grasping the reins, the driver by his team?Is onward borne, nor heeds the car his curb.
GEORGIC II
Thus far the tilth of fields and stars of heaven;?Now will I sing thee, Bacchus, and, with thee,?The forest's young plantations and the fruit?Of slow-maturing olive. Hither haste,?O Father of the wine-press; all things here?Teem with the bounties of thy hand; for thee?With viny autumn laden blooms the field,?And foams the vintage high with brimming vats;?Hither, O Father of the wine-press, come,?And stripped of buskin stain thy bared limbs?In the new must with me.
First, nature's law?For generating trees is manifold;?For some of their own force spontaneous spring,?No hand of man compelling, and possess?The plains and river-windings far and wide,?As pliant osier and the bending broom,?Poplar, and willows in wan companies?With green leaf glimmering gray; and some there be?From chance-dropped seed that rear them, as the tall?Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood,?Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular?Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth?A forest of dense suckers from the root,?As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant,?Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots?The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes?Nature imparted first; hence all the race?Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves?Springs into verdure.
Other means there are,?Which use by method for itself acquired.?One, sliving suckers from the tender frame?Of the tree-mother, plants them in the trench;?One buries the bare stumps within his field,?Truncheons cleft four-wise, or sharp-pointed stakes;?Some forest-trees the layer's bent arch await,?And slips yet quick within the parent-soil;?No root need others, nor doth the pruner's hand?Shrink to restore the topmost shoot to earth?That gave it being. Nay, marvellous to tell,?Lopped of its limbs, the olive, a mere stock,?Still thrusts its root out from the sapless wood,?And oft the branches of one kind we see?Change to another's with no loss to rue,?Pear-tree transformed the ingrafted apple yield,?And stony cornels on the plum-tree blush.?Come then, and learn what tilth to each belongs?According to their kinds, ye husbandmen,?And tame with culture the wild fruits, lest earth?Lie idle. O blithe to make all Ismarus?One forest of the wine-god, and to clothe?With olives huge Tabernus! And be thou?At hand, and with me ply the voyage of toil?I am bound on, O my glory, O thou that art?Justly the chiefest portion of my fame,?Maecenas, and on this wide ocean launched?Spread sail like wings to waft thee. Not that I?With my poor verse would comprehend the whole,?Nay, though a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths?Were mine, a voice of iron; be thou at hand,?Skirt but the nearer coast-line; see the shore?Is in our grasp; not now with feigned song?Through winding bouts and tedious