'Tis vain to plague the skies with eager prayer,
And offer incense with thy votive song,
If only thou dost ask for marbles fair,
To deck thy palace for the gazing throng.

Not wider fields my oxen to employ,
Nor flowing harvests and abundant land,
I ask of heaven; but for a long life's joy
With thee, and in old age to clasp thy hand.

If when my season of sweet light is o'er,
I, carrying nothing, unto Charon yield,
What profits me a ponderous golden store,
Or that a thousand yoke must plough my field?

What if proud Phrygian columns fill my halls,
Taenarian, Carystian, and the rest,
Or branching groves adorn my spacious walls,
Or golden roof, or floor with marbles dressed?

What pleasure in rare Erythraean dyes,
Or purple pride of Sidon and of Tyre,
Or all that can solicit envious eyes,
And which the mob of fools so well admire?

Wealth has no power to lift life's load of care,
Or free man's lot from Fortune's fatal chain;
With thee, Neaera, poverty looks fair,
And lacking thee, a kingdom were in vain.

O golden day that shall at last restore
My lost love to my arms! O blest indeed,
And worthy to be hallowed evermore!
May some kind god my long petition heed!

No! not dominion, nor Pactolian stream,
Nor all the riches the wide world can give!
These other men may ask. My fondest dream
Is, poor but free, with my true wife to live.

Saturnian Juno, to all nuptials kind,
Receive with grace my ever-anxious vow!
Come, Venus, wafted by the Cyprian wind,
And from thy car of shell smile on me now!

But if the mournful sisters, by whose hands
Our threads of life are spun, refuse me all—
May Pluto bid me to his dreary lands,
Where those wide rivers through the darkness fall!