De Rerum Natura

And checked it back, throughout our members all;

At whose arbitrament indeed sometimes

The stock of matter's forced to change its path,

Throughout our members and throughout our joints,

And, after being forward cast, to be

Reined up, whereat it settles back again.

So seest thou not, how, though external force

Drive men before, and often make them move,

Onward against desire, and headlong snatched,

Yet is there something in these breasts of ours

Strong to combat, strong to withstand the same?-

Wherefore no less within the primal seeds

Thou must admit, besides all blows and weight,

Some other cause of motion, whence derives

This power in us inborn, of some free act.-

Since naught from nothing can become, we see.

For weight prevents all things should come to pass

Through blows, as 'twere, by some external force;

But that man's mind itself in all it does

Hath not a fixed necessity within,

Nor is not, like a conquered thing, compelled

To bear and suffer,- this state comes to man

From that slight swervement of the elements

In no fixed line of space, in no fixed time.

Nor ever was the stock of stuff more crammed,

Nor ever, again, sundered by bigger gaps:

For naught gives increase and naught takes away;

On which account, just as they move to-day,

The elemental bodies moved of old

And shall the same hereafter evermore.

And what was wont to be begot of old

Shall be begotten under selfsame terms

And grow and thrive in power, so far as given

To each by Nature's changeless, old decrees.

The sum of things there is no power can change,

For naught exists outside, to which can flee

Out of the world matter of any kind,

Nor forth from which a fresh supply can spring,

Break in upon the founded world, and change

Whole nature of things, and turn their motions about.

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.

Now come, and next hereafter apprehend

What sorts, how vastly different in form,

How varied in multitudinous shapes they are-

These old beginnings of the universe;

Not in the sense that only few are furnished

With one like form, but rather not at all

In general have they likeness each with each,

No marvel: since the stock of them's so great

That there's no end (as I have taught) nor sum,

They must indeed not one and all be marked

By equal outline and by shape the same.

. . . . . .

Moreover, humankind, and the mute flocks

Of scaly creatures swimming in the streams,

And joyous herds around, and all the wild,

And all the breeds of birds- both those that teem

In gladsome regions of the water-haunts,

About the river-banks and springs and pools,

And those that throng, flitting from tree to tree,

Through trackless woods- Go, take which one thou wilt,

In any kind: thou wilt discover still

Each from the other still unlike in shape.

Nor in no other wise could offspring know

Mother, nor mother offspring- which we see

They yet can do, distinguished one from other,

No less than human beings, by clear signs.

Thus oft before fair temples of the gods,