Leaves, also, are thy children; and leaves, too, are they who cry out so if they are worthy of credit, or bestow their praise, or on the contrary curse, or secretly blame and sneer; and leaves, in like manner, are those who shall receive and transmit a man's fame to after-times. For all such things as these "are produced in the season of spring," as the poet says; then the wind casts them down; then the forest produces other leaves in their places. But a brief existence is common to all things, and yet thou avoidest and pursuest all things as if they would be eternal.
X, 34
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
VI. 146–149 (tr. R. Lattimore); Glaucus to Diomed.
Alexander Pope's translation:
: Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise:
So generations in their course decay;
So flourish these, when those are past away.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Source: The Iliad
“For the time being
Words scatter
Are they fallen leaves?”
Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being
Source: A Tale for the Time Being
W.B. Yeats book The Tower
V, st. 1 <br class="br">The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
“The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.”
William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer
“Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me
how little now remains”
Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer
"A Speech at the Lost-and-Found"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Could Have (1972)
Context: Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me
how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily
declined in human form, just now making such a fuss
about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus.
Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist
Book VI, lines 149–152; Glaucus to Diomedes.
Translations, Iliad (1997)
“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?”
Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio
Canto XII, lines 95–96 (tr. C. E. Norton).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) British writer
Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 86, Vol. 2
“And so I leave
On cruel winds
Squalling
And gusting me
Like a dead leaf
Falling.”
Paul Verlaine Chanson d'automne
Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
"Chanson d'automne", line 13, from Poèmes saturniens (1866); Sorrell p. 27
