Complete Poems

When they are stirred by the sun through the thin works of the lands.
How I marvel at the numbers, how I marvel at the poems akin to the grandiloquent Muses,
How I marvel at the movements of the fire-born frenzy:
Yet I grieve, Brassacus, at the turn of events, and the efforts of a learned
Judgment, when it gives the heavy to things, when it gives the light;
As if nature were to abjure her own work, like a deposit
Left in her care. For if he should rashly call this heavy, and this light:
Let him say also that this is, and at the same time is not what this is.
But if the earth is that which it was, the earth cannot not be itself; if
It owes itself either to itself, or to another. If it moves itself:
The motion is not rash. If another now determines this for it:
It is not rash; finally, no order is made by chance.
Then, he who wrote that the sensible is born from the insensible,
And that sound and color are added to the primary bodies,
And often shadows the name of nature upon these things.
If he professes that the parts of the world, which he himself calls the whole,
Are reconciled by nature, and consist in it:
Why does he not grant a council of the whole to nature?
Furthermore, after the vapor and the primary, most thin
Machinery of the heaven retreated into the highest temples,
And now are in their proper place: why do they not rest in safety?
For what, indeed, do they seek, if they have that which they
Initially set out to seek? And they prefer to be moved, restless,
If it were possible to hold on to the pleasures granted to the gods.
For if motion has separated them from their opposites: and if these things
Fight for this reason, because they are contrary: why
Does the heaven urge itself on; why is it, as it were, a lost enemy to itself?
Or does it seek other abodes with better hopes,
As Sisyphus desired the sliding weights of the stone;
And is he forever miserable in his work, and gains not a whit?
I have written this, because insanity turns many men,
Whose greedy minds it steals from a seductive ear,
Touching their hearts with honeyed words of flowering charm.
Whence they please themselves in another’s shame, being base.