While the moon is shining over mouldy books-stacks penned by sages
Thinking takes him back through thousands upon thousands of hoar ages
To the very first, when being and non-being were nought still,
When there was but utter absence of both life-impulse and will,
When unopen there was nothing, although everything was hidden,'
When, by His own self pervaded, resting lay the Allforbidden.
Was it an abyss? chasm? watery plains without an end?
There was no estate of wisdom, nor a mind to comprehend.
For the darkness was as solid as is still the shadows' ocean,
And no eyes, had there been any, could have formed of it a notion.
Of the unmade things the shadows had not yet begun to gleam
And, with its own self-contented, peace eternal reigned supreme.
Suddenly, a dot starts moving - the primeval, lonely Other...
It becomes the father potent, of the void it makes the mother.
Weaker than a drop of water, this small dot that moves and bounds
Is the unrestricted ruler of the world's unbounded bounds.
Ever since the vasty dimness has been splitting slice by slice,
Ever since come into being earth, sun, moon, light, heat, and ice.
Ever since up to the present gallaxies of planets lost
Follow up mysterious courses, chaos-bred and chaos-tossed,
And in endlessness begotten, endless swarms of light are thronging
Towards life, for ever driven by an infinite of longing;
And in this great world, we, children of a world grotesquely small,
Raise upon our tiny planet anthills to o'ertop the All,
Lilliputian kings and peoples, soldiers, unread, erudite,
We engender generations, reckoning ourselves full bright!
One-day moths upon a mudball measeurable with the chip,
We rotate in the great vastness and forget 'twixt cup and lip
That this world is really nothing but a moment caught in light,
That behind, or else before it, all that one can see is night.
Just like whirls of dust and powder thousands of live granules play
In a glorious ray's dominion and pass over with the ray.
Thus against the never-failing night of time without a bound,
The spontaneous ray, the moment, still fails not to go the round;
When it dies, all dies - like shadows melting in the murky distance
For the universe chimeric is a dream of non-existence.

Nowadays a thinker's judgement is restricted by no tether;
He projects it in a moment over centuries together.
To his eye the sun all-glorious is a red orb wrapt in shrouds,
Closing like a bleeding ulcer among all-darkening clouds,
He sees how the heavenly bodies in vast spaces freeze and run,
Rebels that have torn the fetters of the dazzling light and sun;
And, behold, the world's foundation is now blackened to the core,
And the stars, like leaves in autumn, flicker out and are no more,
Lifeless Time distends his body and becomes endless duration,
Because nothing ever happens in the boundless desolation;
In the night of non-existence all is crumbled, all are slain,
And, in keeping with its nature, peace eternal reigns again.