Laudator Temporis Acti

Poem by Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873), in his Selected Poems. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by John Dewey (Gillingham: Brimstone Press, 2014), p. 126:

Of all the life that raged so violently,
Of all the blood that flowed in rivers here,
What has survived, what traces persevere?
Two or three burial mounds are all we see...

And on them oak-trees, fully-grown meanwhile,
Sprawl confidently; there, with branches stirring,
They stand in lofty majesty, not caring
Whose bones, whose memory their roots defile.

For Nature has no knowledge of the past —
Our phantom years do not concern or touch her;
And faced with her we dimly see at last
Ourselves as a mere fantasy of Nature.

When each has played its futile part in turn,
She gathers in her children to her bosom,
Where all without distinction come to learn
The healing stillness of that all-engulfing chasm.

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), A Window on Russia for the Use of Foreign Readers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 35:

Tyutchev gives final expression to his fundamental point of view in a poem written not long before his death. Do the oaks, he asks, that grow on ancient barrows, that spread their branches and grow grand and speak with their leaves—do they care into whose dust and memory they are plunging their long roots? "Nature knows nothing of the past: our lives to her are alien and phantoms; and, standing in her presence, we dimly apprehend that we ourselves are but part of her revery. Indiscriminately, one by one, when they are done with their futile exploit, she welcomes all her children into her fathomless depths that swallow and reconcile all."

Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898), Oaks. Evening