Kochanowski, Jan, Laments

(Berkeley :  University of California Press,  1920.)

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Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
Juppiter auctiferas lustravit lumine terras.
 

LAMENT I

Come, Heraclitus and Simonides,

Come with your weeping and sad elegies:

Ye griefs and sorrows, come from all the lands

Wherein ye sigh and wail and wring your hands:

Gather ye here within my house today

And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May

Ungodly Death hath ta'en to his estate,

Leaving me on a sudden desolate.

'Tis so a serpent glides on some shy nest

And, of the tiny nightingales possessed.

Doth glut its throat, though, frenzied with her fear.

The mother bird doth beat and twitter near

And strike the monster, till it turns and gapes

To swallow her, and she but just escapes.

(i 'Tig vain to weep,'' my friends perchance will say.

Dear God, is aught in life not vain, then?   Nay,

Seek to lie soft, yet thorns will prickly be:

The life of man is naught but vanity.

Ah, which were better, then—to seek relief

In tears, or sternly strive to conquer grief?
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