The candle’s flame with crackling consumed
The beetles and their fond hearts so doom’d:
While some with their lives did expiation,
Some only lost wings in the conflagration.
O woe to the beetle, whose wings have been
Burnt off! In a foreign land, I ween,
He must crawl on the ground like vermin fell,
With humid insects that nastily smell.
One’s bad companions—he’s heard to say,—
Are the worst of plagues, in exile’s day.
We’re forced to converse with every sort
Of noxious creatures, of bugs in short,
Who treat us as though their comrades were we,
Because in the selfsame mud we be.
Of this complain’d old Virgil’s scholar,
The poet of exile and hell, with choler.
I think with grief of the happier time,
When I in my glory’s well-winged prime
In my native ether was playing,
On sunny flowers was straying.
From rosy calixes food I drew,
Was thought of importance, and wheeling flew
With butterflies all of elegance rare,
And with the cricket, the artist fair.
But since my poor wings I happen’d to burn,
To my fatherland now I ne’er can return;
I’m turn’d to a worm, that will soon expire,
I’m rotting away in foreign mire.
O would that I had never met
The dragonfly, that azure coquette,
With figure so fine and slender,
The fair but cruel pretender!
10. ASCENSION.
The body lay on the bier of death,
While the poor soul, when gone its breath,
Escaping from earth’s constant riot,
Was on its way to heavenly quiet.