De Rerum Natura

For what to one had given the power to take

The vital winds of air into his mouth,

And to gaze upward at the vaults of sky,

The same to others was their death and doom.

In those affairs, O awfullest of all,

O pitiable most was this, was this:

Whoso once saw himself in that disease

Entangled, ay, as damned unto death,

Would lie in wanhope, with a sullen heart,

Would, in fore-vision of his funeral,

Give up the ghost, O then and there. For, lo,

At no time did they cease one from another

To catch contagion of the greedy plague,-

As though but woolly flocks and horned herds;

And this in chief would heap the dead on dead:

For who forbore to look to their own sick,

O these (too eager of life, of death afeard)

Would then, soon after, slaughtering Neglect

Visit with vengeance of evil death and base-

Themselves deserted and forlorn of help.

But who had stayed at hand would perish there

By that contagion and the toil which then

A sense of honour and the pleading voice

Of weary watchers, mixed with voice of wail

Of dying folk, forced them to undergo.

This kind of death each nobler soul would meet.

The funerals, uncompanioned, forsaken,

Like rivals contended to be hurried through.

. . . . . .

And men contending to ensepulchre

Pile upon pile the throng of their own dead:

And weary with woe and weeping wandered home;

And then the most would take to bed from grief.

Nor could be found not one, whom nor disease

Nor death, nor woe had not in those dread times

Attacked.

By now the shepherds and neatherds all,

Yea, even the sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,

Began to sicken, and their bodies would lie

Huddled within back-corners of their huts,

Delivered by squalor and disease to death.

O often and often couldst thou then have seen

On lifeless children lifeless parents prone,

Or offspring on their fathers', mothers' corpse

Yielding the life. And into the city poured

O not in least part from the countryside

That tribulation, which the peasantry

Sick, sick, brought thither, thronging from every quarter,

Plague-stricken mob. All places would they crowd,

All buildings too; whereby the more would death

Up-pile a-heap the folk so crammed in town.

Ah, many a body thirst had dragged and rolled

Along the highways there was lying strewn

Besides Silenus-headed water-fountains,-

The life-breath choked from that too dear desire

Of pleasant waters. Ah, everywhere along

The open places of the populace,

And along the highways, O thou mightest see

Of many a half-dead body the sagged limbs,

Rough with squalor, wrapped around with rags,

Perish from very nastiness, with naught

But skin upon the bones, well-nigh already

Buried- in ulcers vile and obscene filth.

All holy temples, too, of deities

Had Death becrammed with the carcasses;

And stood each fane of the Celestial Ones

Laden with stark cadavers everywhere-

Places which warders of the shrines had crowded

With many a guest. For now no longer men

Did mightily esteem the old Divine,

The worship of the gods: the woe at hand

Did over-master. Nor in the city then

Remained those rites of sepulture, with which

That pious folk had evermore been wont

To buried be. For it was wildered all

In wild alarms, and each and every one

With sullen sorrow would bury his own dead,

As present shift allowed. And sudden stress

And poverty to many an awful act

Impelled; and with a monstrous screaming they

Would, on the frames of alien funeral pyres,

Place their own kin, and thrust the torch beneath

Oft brawling with much bloodshed round about

Rather than quit dead bodies loved in life.