On the Nature of Things - Тит Лукреций Кар

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In more condensed union bound aback,

           Linked by their own all inter-tangled shapes,—

           These form the irrefragable roots of rocks

           And the brute bulks of iron, and what else

           Is of their kind…

           The rest leap far asunder, far recoil,

           Leaving huge gaps between: and these supply

           For us thin air and splendour-lights of the sun.

           And many besides wander the mighty void—

           Cast back from unions of existing things,

           Nowhere accepted in the universe,

           And nowise linked in motions to the rest.

           And of this fact (as I record it here)

           An image, a type goes on before our eyes

           Present each moment; for behold whenever

           The sun's light and the rays, let in, pour down

           Across dark halls of houses: thou wilt see

           The many mites in many a manner mixed

           Amid a void in the very light of the rays,

           And battling on, as in eternal strife,

           And in battalions contending without halt,

           In meetings, partings, harried up and down.

           From this thou mayest conjecture of what sort

           The ceaseless tossing of primordial seeds

           Amid the mightier void—at least so far

           As small affair can for a vaster serve,

           And by example put thee on the spoor

           Of knowledge. For this reason too 'tis fit

           Thou turn thy mind the more unto these bodies

           Which here are witnessed tumbling in the light:

           Namely, because such tumblings are a sign

           That motions also of the primal stuff

           Secret and viewless lurk beneath, behind.

           For thou wilt mark here many a speck, impelled

           By viewless blows, to change its little course,

           And beaten backwards to return again,

           Hither and thither in all directions round.

           Lo, all their shifting movement is of old,

           From the primeval atoms; for the same

           Primordial seeds of things first move of self,

           And then those bodies built of unions small

           And nearest, as it were, unto the powers

           Of the primeval atoms, are stirred up

           By impulse of those atoms' unseen blows,

           And these thereafter goad the next in size:

           Thus motion ascends from the primevals on,

           And stage by stage emerges to our sense,

           Until those objects also move which we

           Can mark in sunbeams, though it not appears

           What blows do urge them.

                                   Herein wonder not

           How 'tis that, while the seeds of things are all

           Moving forever, the sum yet seems to stand

           Supremely still, except in cases where

           A thing shows motion of its frame as whole.

           For far beneath the ken of senses lies

           The nature of those ultimates of the world;

           And so, since those themselves thou canst not see,

           Their motion also must they veil from men—

           For mark, indeed, how things we can see, oft

           Yet hide their motions, when afar from us

           Along the distant landscape. Often thus,

           Upon a hillside will the woolly flocks

           Be cropping their goodly food and creeping about

           Whither the summons of the grass, begemmed

           With the fresh dew, is calling, and the lambs,

           Well filled, are frisking, locking horns in sport:

           Yet all for us seem blurred and blent afar—

           A glint of white at rest on a green hill.

           Again, when mighty legions, marching round,

           Fill all the quarters of the plains below,

           Rousing a mimic warfare, there the sheen

           Shoots up the sky, and all the fields about

           Glitter with brass, and from beneath, a sound

           Goes forth from feet of stalwart soldiery,

           And mountain walls, smote by the shouting, send

           The voices onward to the stars of heaven,

           And hither and thither darts the cavalry,

           And of a sudden down the midmost fields

           Charges with onset stout enough to rock

           The solid earth: and yet some post there is

           Up the high mountains, viewed from which they seem

           To stand—a gleam at rest along the plains.

            Now what the speed to matter's atoms given

           Thou mayest in few, my Memmius, learn from this:

           When first the dawn is sprinkling with new light

           The lands, and all the breed of birds abroad

           Flit round the trackless forests, with liquid notes

           Filling the regions along the mellow air,

           We see 'tis forthwith manifest to man

           How suddenly the risen sun is wont

           At such an hour to overspread and clothe

           The whole with its own splendour; but the sun's

           Warm exhalations and this serene light

           Travel not down an empty void; and thus

           They are compelled more slowly to advance,

           Whilst, as it were, they cleave the waves of air;

           Nor one by one travel these particles

           Of the warm exhalations, but are all

           Entangled and enmassed, whereby at once

           Each is restrained by each, and from without

          

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