De Rerum Natura

With the soft down and let from both his cheeks

The soft beard fall. And lastly, thunder-bolts,

Snow, rains, clouds, winds, at seasons of the year

Nowise unfixed, all do come to pass.

For where, even from their old primordial start

Causes have ever worked in such a way,

And where, even from the world's first origin,

Thuswise have things befallen, so even now

After a fixed order they come round

In sequence also.

Likewise, days may wax

Whilst the nights wane, and daylight minished be

Whilst nights do take their augmentations,

Either because the self-same sun, coursing

Under the lands and over in two arcs,

A longer and a briefer, doth dispart

The coasts of ether and divides in twain

His orbit all unequally, and adds,

As round he's borne, unto the one half there

As much as from the other half he's ta'en,

Until he then arrives that sign of heaven

Where the year's node renders the shades of night

Equal unto the periods of light.

For when the sun is midway on his course

Between the blasts of northwind and of south,

Heaven keeps his two goals parted equally,

By virtue of the fixed position old

Of the whole starry Zodiac, through which

That sun, in winding onward, takes a year,

Illumining the sky and all the lands

With oblique light- as men declare to us

Who by their diagrams have charted well

Those regions of the sky which be adorned

With the arranged signs of Zodiac.

Or else, because in certain parts the air

Under the lands is denser, the tremulous

Bright beams of fire do waver tardily,

Nor easily can penetrate that air

Nor yet emerge unto their rising-place:

For this it is that nights in winter time

Do linger long, ere comes the many-rayed

Round Badge of the day. Or else because, as said,

In alternating seasons of the year

Fires, now more quick, and now more slow, are wont

To stream together,- the fires which make the sun

To rise in some one spot- therefore it is

That those men seem to speak the truth [who hold

A new sun is with each new daybreak born].

The moon she possibly doth shine because

Strook by the rays of sun, and day by day

May turn unto our gaze her light, the more

She doth recede from orb of sun, until,

Facing him opposite across the world,

She hath with full effulgence gleamed abroad,

And, at her rising as she soars above,

Hath there observed his setting; thence likewise

She needs must hide, as 'twere, her light behind

By slow degrees, the nearer now she glides,

Along the circle of the Zodiac,

From her far place toward fires of yonder sun,-

As those men hold who feign the moon to be

Just like a ball and to pursue a course

Betwixt the sun and earth. There is, again,

Some reason to suppose that moon may roll

With light her very own, and thus display

The varied shapes of her resplendence there.

For near her is, percase, another body,

Invisible, because devoid of light,

Borne on and gliding all along with her,

Which in three modes may block and blot her disk.

Again, she may revolve upon herself,

Like to a ball's sphere- if perchance that be-

One half of her dyed o'er with glowing light,

And by the revolution of that sphere

She may beget for us her varying shapes,

Until she turns that fiery part of her

Full to the sight and open eyes of men;

Thence by slow stages round and back she whirls,

Withdrawing thus the luminiferous part

Of her sphered mass and ball, as, verily,

The Babylonian doctrine of Chaldees,

Refuting the art of Greek astrologers,

Labours, in opposition, to prove sure-

As if, forsooth, the thing for which each fights,

Might not alike be true,- or aught there were

Wherefore thou mightest risk embracing one

More than the other notion. Then, again,

Why a new moon might not forevermore

Created be with fixed successions there

Of shapes and with configurations fixed,

And why each day that bright created moon

Might not miscarry and another be,

In its stead and place, engendered anew,

'Tis hard to show by reason, or by words

To prove absurd- since, lo, so many things

Can be create with fixed successions:

Spring-time and Venus come, and Venus' boy,

The winged harbinger, steps on before,

And hard on Zephyr's foot-prints Mother Flora,

Sprinkling the ways before them, filleth all