Casimir's Cicada

By the early seventeenth-century Polish Jesuit and esteemed neo-Latin poet, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski.

AD CICADAM.

O, quae populea summa sedens coma,
Coeli roriferis ebria lacrymis,
Et te voce Cicada,
Et mutum recreas nemus.

Post longas hiemes, dum nimium brevis
AEstas se levibus praecipitat rotis,
Festinos, age, lento,
Soles excipe jurgio.

Ut se quaeque dies attulit optima,
Sic se quaeque rapit: nulla fecit satis
Umquam longa voluptas,
longus saepius est dolor.


TO THE CICADA.

Sitting on the poplar's highest leaf
Skies drowning your drunken tears,
How you sing, cicada,
And refresh the mute grove.

After long winters, through the too-brief
Summer, he shines on wheeling days,
Hurry, come, slowly,
Suns welcome his strife.

Each bright day brings the best of itself,
And then snatches it away: no he did enough
Pleasure always brief,
pain traps us long.