As on a lonely night
the moon descends,
over the silvery waters and fields,
where the breeze sighs,
and distant shadows make
a thousand vague aspects,
and deceptive objects,
among the tranquil waves,
the branches, hedges, hills, and villages:
and, lost at the sky’s end,
behind Alps or Apennines, or
in endless Tyrrhenian deeps,
sets, and dims the world,
so that shadows scatter, and a single
gloom darkens valley and mountain,
so night remains alone,
and the carter on the road salutes,
with mournful song, the last gleam
of vanishing light that led him on:

      so youth melts away,
and leaves
our mortal state. The shadows
and the forms of delighted
illusion flee: and all the distant
hopes our mortal nature
trusts in, grow less.
Life remains, dark,
abandoned. The uncertain traveller
strains his eyes, blindly, in vain,
to find some goal or reason in the long
road ahead: and sees
how human habitation becomes
truly foreign to him, and he to it.

      Our wretched life
would have seemed
too happy and joyful, up there, if youth,
whose every good brings a thousand ills,
had been allowed to last a lifetime.
The law that sentences
all creatures to death, would be too mild,
if half of life
had not first been made
harsher than the vilest death.
The eternals made a worthy discovery
of immortal intellect: old age,
worst of all evils, where desire
clings, but hope is quenched,
the founts of pleasure run dry, pain
often grows, and good will not return.

      You, hills and shores,
the glory in the west, that silvered
the veil of night, has died,
yet you will not
be widowed long: from the east
you’ll see the sky
whiten anew, and dawn will rise:
then the sun will quickly follow
and, shine out
with powerful flames,
flooding you, and the eternal realms,
with torrents of light.
But mortal life, will not brighten
with new light, or new dawn,
once lovely youth is gone.
It will be lonely to the end: the gods
have set no limit to the gloom
that darkens old age, except the tomb.