post–grad:

The Difficulty of the Undertaking 

Winter, image of age, who like a great belly
Eats up the whole year’s substance and heartlessly
Swallows the fruit of our unstinted labor,
Had gone into hiding deep below the earth.
For Spring had arrived and driven him under. Spring
Source of the world’s life and glory of the year,
Had returned, and was wiping away the ugly traces
Of greedy winter and restoring to ailing fields
Their former loveliness.

A purer air was now beginning to herald
Fine weather. Plants stirred in the zephyr’s path
Thrusting out from their roots the slender tips
Which had long lain hidden in the earth’s blind womb,
Shunning the frost they hate. Spring smiled
In the leaves of the woodland, the lush grass on the slopes
And the bright sward of the cheerful meadows. 

But this little patch which lies facing east
In the small open courtyard before my door
Was full—of nettles! All over
My small piece of land they grew, their barbs
Tipped with a smear of tingling poison. 

What should I do? So thick were the ranks
That grew from the tangle of roots below,
They were like the green hurdles a stableman skillfully
Weaves of pliant osiers when the horses’ hooves
Rot in the standing puddles and go soft as fungus.

So I put it off no longer. I set to with my mattock
And dug up the sluggish ground. From their embraces
I tore those nettles though they grew again and again.
I destroyed the tunnels of the moles that haunt dark places,
And back to the realms of light I summoned the worms. 

Then my small patch was warmed by winds from the south
And the sun’s heat. That it should not be washed away,
We faced it with planks and raised it in oblong beds
A little above the level ground. With a rake
I broke the soil up bit by bit, and then
Worked in from on top the leaven of rich manure.

Some plants we grow from seed, some from old stocks
We try to bring back to the youth they knew before.

(from Strabo’s Hortulus, c. 842. trans. R. Payne)