GEORGIC II
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, And slips yet quick within the parent-soil; No root need others, nor doth the pruner's hand Shrink to restore the topmost shoot to earth That gave it being. Nay, marvellous to tell, Lopped of its limbs, the olive, a mere stock, Still thrusts its root out from the sapless wood, And oft the branches of one kind we see Change to another's with no loss to rue, Pear-tree transformed the ingrafted apple yield, And stony cornels on the plum-tree blush. Come then, and learn what tilth to each belongs According to their kinds, ye husbandmen, And tame with culture the wild fruits, lest earth Lie idle. O blithe to make all Ismarus One forest of the wine-god, and to clothe With olives huge Tabernus! And be thou At hand, and with me ply the voyage of toil I am bound on, O my glory, O thou that art Justly the chiefest portion of my fame, Maecenas, and on this wide ocean launched Spread sail like wings to waft thee. Not that I With my poor verse would comprehend the whole, Nay, though a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths Were mine, a voice of iron; be thou at hand, Skirt but the nearer coast-line; see the shore Is in our grasp; not now with feigned song Through winding bouts and tedious preludings Shall I detain thee. Those that lift their head Into the realms of light spontaneously, Fruitless indeed, but blithe and strenuous spring, Since Nature lurks within the soil.