Georgics

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.

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,