(TRANSLATION BY MUNRO.)
He is a strange man, this Lucretius, obviously nervous and unstable; story has it that a love-philtre has poisoned him, and left him subject to fits of melancholy and insanity. He is all sensitivity, all pride, wounded by every prick of circumstance; a man born for peace, and forced to live in the midst of Caesar’s alarms; a man with the make-up of a mystic and a saint, hardening himself into a materialist and a skeptic; a lonely soul, driven into solitude by his shyness, and yet pining for companionship and affection. He is a dark pessimist, who sees everywhere two self-canceling movements—growth and decay, reproduction and destruction,Venus and Mars, life and death. All forms begin and have their end; only atoms, space, and law remain; birth is a prelude to corruption, and even this massive universe will thaw and flow back into formlessness:
No single thing abides, but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and their suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
Thou too,O Earth—thine empires, lands and seas—
Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too
Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.
Nothing abides.Thy seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
(PARAPHRASE BY MALLOCK.)
It is a sad philosophy, hardly calculated to give men courage in the face of fate; no wonder story tells how Lucretius killed himself (55 B.C.) at the age of forty-one.What ennobles this verse for us is the sincerity of the poet, and the rugged power of the poetry. The Latin of his lines is rude yet; a generation must pass before the language of the Romans will be polished into rhythm and refinement by Cicero’s vain (and Virgil’s careful) pen; but the liquid fluency of the great orator, and the feminine grace of Augustus’ favorite, yield to these masculine hexameters, these picturesque unwonted adjectives, these stately verbs and resounding substantives. As we listen we are transported into the Garden of Epicu-rus, and hear the distant laughter of Democritus, who knew what Lucretius did not know: that gaiety is wiser than wisdom.
5. LI-PO One day, at the height of his reign, the Chinese Emperor Ming Huang received ambassadors from Korea, who brought to him important messages in a dialect which none of his ministers could understand. “What!” exclaimed the emperor, “among so many magistrates, so many scholars and warriors, cannot there be found a single one who knows enough to relieve us of vexation in this affair? If in three days no one is able to decipher this letter, every one of your appointments shall be sus-pended.” For a day the ministers consulted and fretted, fearing for their offices and their heads, then Minister Ho Chi-chang approached the throne and said: “Your subject presumes to announce to your Majesty that there is a poet of great merit called Li at his house, who is perfectly acquainted with more than one science; command him to read this letter, for there is nothing of which he is not capable.”
The emperor ordered Li to present himself at court immediately, but Li refused to come—saying that he could not possibly be worthy of the task, since his essay had been rejected by the Mandarins at the last examination. The emperor soothed him by conferring upon him the title and robes of a doctor of the first rank. Li came, found his examiners among the ministers, forced them to take off his boots, and then translated the documents, which announced that Korea proposed to make war for the recovery of its freedom. Having read the message, he dictated a learned and terrifying answer, which the emperor signed, almost believing Ho, that Li was an angel descended from heaven. The Koreans sent tribute and apologies, and the emperor gave part of the tribute to Li. Li gave it to the innkeeper, for he loved wine.
Li Tai-po, the Keats of China, had discovered the world in A.D. 701. “For twenty springs,” he lived “among the clouds, loving leisure and enamored of the hills.” He grew in health and strength, and became practiced in the ways of love.
Wine of the grapes,
Goblets of gold—
And a pretty maid ofWu.
She comes on pony-back; she is fifteen;
Blue-painted eyebrows—
Shoes of pink brocade—
Inarticulate speech—
But she sings bewitchingly well.
So, feasting at the table
Inlaid with tortoise shell,
She gets drunk in my lap.
Ah, child,what caresses
Behind lily-embroidered curtains!
And then the aftermath:
Fair one,when you were here, I filled the house with flowers.
Fair one, now you are gone, only an empty couch is left.
On the couch the embroidered quilt is rolled up; I cannot sleep.
It is three years since you went. The perfume you left behind haunts me still.
The perfume strays about me forever; but where are you, Beloved?
I sigh—the yellow leaves fall from the branch.
I weep—the dew twinkles white on the green mosses.
He married, but made so little gold that his wife abandoned him, taking the children with her. Li-po consoled himself with the grape and traveled from city to city, earning crumbs of bread with sheaves of song. Hearing praise of the wine of Niauching, he made at once for that city, over three hundred miles of Chinese—i.e., impassable—roads. Everybody loved him, for he spoke with the same pride and friendliness to both paupers and kings. At the capital the emperor befriended him, but could not command him. Says his fellow poet Tu Fu:
As for Li-po, give him a jugful,
He will write one hundred poems.
He dozes in a wine-shop
On a city street of Chang-an;
And though his Sovereign calls,
He will not board the Imperial barge.
“Please your Majesty,” says he,
“I am a god of wine.”
He accepted the philosophy of Liu Ling, who desired to be followed always by two servants, one with inexhaustible wine, the other with a spade to bury him wherever he might fall; for, said Liu, “the affairs of this world are no more than duck-weed in the river.” So they soon seemed to Li, for when Ming Huang lost his throne for love the poet lost a patron, and fled from Chang-an to wander again over the countryside.