Complete Poems

Whatever things might be able to fill my soul, and never sate it,
I have been pleased to exercise this immortal honor of the charming Muses,
Lest I be void and devoid either of these refinements, which are
Adapted by honest cultivation; or of those goods which cruel fate
Has commanded [us] to lead about, and to draw away from death,
Which comes to bodies by the law of nature, and to slothful souls
Which have stripped themselves of their humanity as well. For
The common folk, dying for others, die, yet living for themselves.
Therefore, Brassacus, I greet you often with my little verses,
Although I could do so more conveniently with words loosed from the law [of meter].
But it is a wonder how great a sweet love for the servant of a well-cultivated
Speech captures me, a love which neither fear can destroy, nor labor deter:
Lest I provoke laughter, lest I dare to struggle in vain.
For although the barbarian land of Rome has raised me—an outsider—
Yet my bold mind has pressed toward it,
And made me a citizen, as far as the language itself is concerned.
For even the Roman himself is a stranger in his ancestral tongue,
As distant in his customs from the ancient manner as
A true man is far from a feigned one, and a living man from a corpse.
Hardly is he his own at Rome, just as he is now a shadow of his own name.
Whence it happens that he takes pleasure in his own vices, and abandons
The true monuments of the ancestral speech to those Latins
Who are able to represent the ancient Latium with a fruitful mind,
At once charming, and [able] to arrange poems in no less cultivated a language.
If among these you see that I am worthy of even a breath of fame,
And you believe it, then I do not repent of my deeds, I claim,
And I affirm it to be such at your own risk, Brassacus.

To the book of Lilius Gyraldus concerning the poets.

After I had persuaded my mind to omit nothing
That is conducive to living well and happily: