Читать книгу The Georgics - Virgil - Страница 2

Thus far the tilth of fields and stars of heaven;

Now will I sing thee, Bacchus, and, with thee,

The forest's young plantations and the fruit

Of slow-maturing olive. Hither haste,

O Father of the wine-press; all things here

Teem with the bounties of thy hand; for thee

With viny autumn laden blooms the field,

And foams the vintage high with brimming vats;

Hither, O Father of the wine-press, come,

And stripped of buskin stain thy bared limbs

In the new must with me.

First, nature's law

For generating trees is manifold;

For some of their own force spontaneous spring,

No hand of man compelling, and possess

The plains and river-windings far and wide,

As pliant osier and the bending broom,

Poplar, and willows in wan companies

With green leaf glimmering gray; and some there be

From chance-dropped seed that rear them, as the tall

Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood,

Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular

Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth

A forest of dense suckers from the root,

As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant,

Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots

The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes

Nature imparted first; hence all the race

Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves

Springs into verdure.

Other means there are,

Which use by method for itself acquired.

One, sliving suckers from the tender frame

Of the tree-mother, plants them in the trench;

One buries the bare stumps within his field,

Truncheons cleft four-wise, or sharp-pointed stakes;

Some forest-trees the layer's bent arch await,