Our years keep taking toll as they move on;
My feasts, my frolics are already gone,
And now, it seems, my verses must go too: 
Bestead so sorely, what’s a man to do? 
Aye, and besides, my friends who’d have me chant
Are not agreed upon the thing they want: 
You like an ode; for epodes others cry,
While some love satire spiced and seasoned high. 
Three guests, I find, for different dishes call,
And how’s one host to satisfy them all? 
I bring your neighbour what he asks, you glower: 
Obliging you, I turn two stomachs sour.

Think too of Rome:  can I write verses here,
Where there’s so much to tease and interfere? 
One wants me for his surety; one, still worse,
Bids me leave work to hear him just rehearse;
One’s ill on Aventine, the farthest end,
One on Quirinal; both must see their friend. 
Observe the distance.  “What of that?” you say,
“The streets are clear; make verses by the way.” 
There goes a builder’s gang, all haste and steam;
Yon crane lifts granite, or perhaps a beam;
Waggons and funerals jostle; a mad dog
Ran by just now; that splash was from a hog: 
Go now, abstract yourself from outward things,
And “hearken what the inner spirit sings.” 
Bards fly from town and haunt the wood and glade;
Bacchus, their chief, likes sleeping in the shade;
And how should I, with noises all about,
Tread where they tread and make their footprints out? 
Take idle Athens now; a wit who’s spent
Seven years in studying there, on books intent,
Turns out as stupid as a stone, and shakes
The crowd with laughter at his odd mistakes: 
Here, in this roaring, tossing, weltering sea,
To tune sweet lyrics, is that work for me?

Two brothers, counsellor and pleader, went
Through life on terms of mutual compliment;
That thought the other Gracchus, this supposed
His brother Mucius; so they praised and prosed. 
Our tuneful race the selfsame madness goads: 
My friend writes elegies, and I write odes: 
O how we puff each other! “’Tis divine;
The Muses had a hand in every line.” 
Remark our swagger as we pass the dome
Built to receive the future bards of Rome;
Then follow us and listen what we say,
How each by turns awards and takes the bay. 
Like Samnite fencers, with elaborate art
We hit in tierce to be hit back in quart. 
I’m dubbed Alcaeus, and retire in force: 
And who is he?  Callimachus of course: 
Or, if ’tis not enough, I bid him rise
Mimnermus, and he swells to twice his size. 
Writing myself, I’m tortured to appease
Those wasp-like creatures, our poetic bees: 
But when my pen’s laid down, my sense restored,
I rest from boring, rest from being bored.