| |
Translated by C. A. Elton
BLEST is the man who in his father’s fields | |
| Has past an age of quiet. The same roof | |
| That screened his cradle yields a shelter now | |
| To his gray hairs. He leans upon a staff | |
| Where as a child he crept along the ground, | 5 |
| And in one cottage he has numbered o’er | |
| A length of years. Him fortune has not drawn | |
| Into her whirl of strange vicissitudes; | |
| Nor has he drunk, with ever-changing home, | |
| From unknown rivers. Never on the deep, | 10 |
| A merchant, has he trembled at the storm; | |
| Nor, as a soldier, started at the blare | |
| Of trumpets; nor endured the noisy strife | |
| Of the hoarse-clamoring bar: of the great world | |
| Simply unconscious. To the neighboring town | 15 |
| A stranger, he enjoys the free expanse | |
| Of open heaven. The old man marks his year, | |
| Not by the names of consuls, but computes | |
| Time by his various crops: by apples notes | |
| The autumn; by the blooming flower the spring. | 20 |
| From the same field he sees his daily sun | |
| Go down, and lift again its reddening orb; | |
| And, by his own contracted universe, | |
| The rustic measures the vast light of day. | |
| He well remembers that broad massive oak | 25 |
| An acorn; and has seen the grove grow old, | |
| Coeval with himself. Verona seems | |
| To him more distant than the swarthy Ind: | |
| He deems the lake Benacus like the shores | |
| Of the red gulf. But his a vigor hale | 30 |
| And unabated: he has now outlived | |
| Three ages; though a grandsire, green in years, | |
| With firm and sinewy arms. The traveller | |
| May roam to farthest Spain: he more has known | |
| Of earthly space; the old man more of life. | 35 |
| |
