Spis treści

      Jan KochanowskiLamentsLament IItłum. Dorothea Prall

      1
      If I had ever thought to write in praise
      Of little children and their simple ways,
      Far rather had I fashioned cradle verse
      To rock to slumber, or the songs a nurse
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      Might croon above the baby on her breast,
      Setting her charge's short-lived woes at rest.
      For much more useful are such trifling tasks
      Than that which sad misfortune this day asks:
      To weep o'er thy deaf grave, dear maiden mine,
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      And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine[1].
      But now I have no choice of subject: then
      I shunned a theme scarce fitting riper men,
      And now disaster drives me on by force
      To songs unheeded by the great concourse
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      Of mortals. Verses that I would not sing
      The living, to the dead I needs must bring.
      Yet though I dry the marrow from my bones,
      Weeping another's death, my grief atones
      No whit. All forms of human doom
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      Arouse but transient thoughts of joy or gloom.
      O law unjust, O grimmest of all maids,
      Inexorable princess of the shades!
      For, Ursula, thou hadst but tasted time
      And art departed long before thy prime.
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      Thou hardly knewest that the sun was bright
      Ere thou didst vanish to the halls of night.
      I would thou hadst not lived that little breath —
      What didst thou know, but only birth, then death?
      And all the joy a loving child should bring
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      Her parents, is become their bitterest sting.

      Przypisy

      [1]

      Proserpine — Roman goddess of spring, spending winter in the underworld as a wife of Pluto; equivalent of Greek Persephone. [przypis edytorski]