When thy life thou scarcely knowest thinkest thou that others care
Thoroughly to know thy story or thy memory to spare?
Later, some pedantic scholar, on the trashy volumes’ pile
Sitting, trash himself, will study in thy books the Attic style,
Showing some mistakes and errors, which thou madest long ago,
And the dust of those old volumes from his spectacles will blow;
To reward thy toil he’ll give thee, great attention, learned sage,
Two lines in a random footnote, ending thus a stupid page.
One may build a world, destroy it: over what one thinks holds fast.
Whatsoe’er it be, a shovel full of earth is thrown at last.
Heads a universe enclosing, sceptered hands desiring sway
Over empires vast unbounded, ’tween four boards must lie one day…
There a funeral procession gravely, solemnly advances,
So ironically splendid, with indifferent side glances;
And some little man’s oration, this will be of all the ending,
Not thy character extolling, but himself at last commending
Under thy good name’s great shadow: this is all that waits for thee.
But posterity e’en fairer still will be, O thou wilt see…
Since they could not reach thy standard, thinkest thou they will admire?
The biographer so artful, who fulfils all their desire,
Him they’ll praise, when he will show that thou resemblest all the others,
Not a genius, but so common, that you well might have been brothers.
All are highly flattered thinking that thou wert not more than they,
And with pride their nostrils swelling, their stupidity display;
Always when they talk about thee in their learned coteries,
With ironic smile to praise thee, in mere words, well settled ’tis.
Falling to their hands, with pleasure, with great joy they’ll dust thy jacket,
They will judge with understanding, without seeing that they lack it…
They will seek out all thy blunders, out of malice sheer to blame thee,
To find all the little scandals, every blemish, to defame thee—
This is all that brings thee near them, not the light that thou hast shed
In this world of sin and sorrow, but the faults, the sins inbred,
And the lassitude, the weakness, all that may impair thy worth,
Evils fatally inherent in a handful of this earth;
Miseries of poor tormented human soul, for everyone
These will be the things that please them, not what thou hast thought and done
