. . . may I delight in the rural fields

And the little brooks that make their way through valleys

And in obscurity love the woods and rivers.

--from the second Georgic

John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37-30 BCE, "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature.

The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the bees. There's joy in the detail of Virgil's descriptions of work well done, and ecstatic joy in his praise of the very life of things, and passionate commiseration too, because of the vulnerability of men and all other creatures, with all they have to contend with: storms, and plagues, and wars, and all mischance.

David Ferry is the author of Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations. He is the translator of Gilgamesh (1992), The Odes of Horace (1998), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), and The Epistles of Horace (2001), winner of the Landon Translation Prize, all published by FSG.