Eugene Oneguine [Onegin]. A Romance of Russian Life in Verse

To his Penates now returned, Vladimir Lenski visited His neighbour's lowly tomb and mourned Above the ashes of the dead.There long time sad at heart he stayed: "Poor Yorick," mournfully he said, "How often in thine arms I lay; How with thy medal I would play, The Medal Otchakoff conferred![31] To me he would his Olga give, Would whisper: shall I so long live?"— And by a genuine sorrow stirred, Lenski his pencil-case took out And an elegiac poem wrote.

XXXVIII

Likewise an epitaph with tears 

He writes upon his parents' tomb, And thus ancestral dust reveres. Oh! on the fields of life how bloom Harvests of souls unceasingly By Providence's dark decree!They blossom, ripen and they fall And others rise ephemeral! Thus our light race grows up and lives, A moment effervescing stirs, Then seeks ancestral sepulchres, The appointed hour arrives, arrives!And our successors soon shall drive Us from the world wherein we live.

XXXIX

Meantime, drink deeply of the flow Of frivolous existence, friends; Its insignificance I know 

And care but little for its ends.To dreams I long have closed mine eyes, Yet sometimes banished hopes will rise And agitate my heart again; And thus it is 'twould cause me pain Without the faintest trace to leave This world. I do not praise desire, Yet still apparently aspire My mournful fate in verse to weave, That like a friendly voice its tone Rescue me from oblivion.

XL

Perchance some heart 'twill agitate, And then the stanzas of my theme Will not, preserved by kindly Fate, Perish absorbed by Lethe's stream.

Then it may be, O flattering tale, Some future ignoramus shall My famous portrait indicate And cry: he was a poet great!My gratitude do not disdain, Admirer of the peaceful Muse, Whose memory doth not refuse My light productions to retain, Whose hands indulgently caress The bays of age and helplessness.

End of Canto the Second.

CANTO THE THIRD

The Country Damsel

'Elle etait fille, elle etait amoureuse'

Malfilatre 

I

"Whither away? Deuce take the bard!"— 

"Good-bye, Oneguine, I must go."— 

"I won't detain you; but 'tis hard 

To guess how you the eve pull through."—

"At Larina's."—"Hem, that is queer! 

Pray is it not a tough affair 

Thus to assassinate the eve?"— 

"Not at all."—"That I can't conceive!

'Tis something of this sort I deem. 

In the first place, say, am I right? 

A Russian household simple quite, 

Who welcome guests with zeal extreme, 

Preserves and an eternal prattle 

About the rain and flax and cattle."—

II