Lament II

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     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.     And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine.     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     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     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.     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     Her parents, is become their bitterest sting.