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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 86

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 86 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

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Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear me, O Death [Thanatos], whose empire unconfin'd, extends to mortal tribes of ev'ry kind.

2

Primary

On thee, the portion of our time depends, whose absence lengthens life, whose presence ends.

3

Primary

Thy sleep perpetual bursts the vivid folds, by which the soul, attracting body holds:

4

Primary

Common to all of ev'ry sex and age, for nought escapes thy all-destructive rage;

5

Primary

Not youth itself thy clemency can gain, vig'rous and strong, by thee untimely slain.

6

Primary

In thee, the end of nature's works is known, in thee, all judgment is absolv'd alone:

7

Primary

No suppliant arts thy dreadful rage controul, no vows revoke the purpose of thy soul;

8

Primary

O blessed pow'r regard my ardent pray'r, and human life to age abundant spare.

Text notes and edition context

Work

Orphic Hymns

The Orphic Hymns compress cosmology, prayer, ritual address, and divine epithets into compact devotional poems especially suited to meditative and oracle-like reading; the corpus now also carries an Abel-based Greek witness aligned as honestly as possible against the existing Taylor English sequence.

Hymns | Original language: Ancient Greek

Late Hellenistic to early Imperial Greek religious poetry, often dated between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE

You are reading Hymn 86.

Primary Edition

Thomas Taylor

English | Verse

Late 18th-century English verse translation

Taylor's version is archaic, charged, and openly mystical, making it one of the strongest public-domain oracle-friendly English renderings of the Orphic Hymns.

This edition uses canonical hymn numbering and line-level segmentation, omitting the prefatory Musaeus proem from the main corpus model.

Source family: English aggregate translations

Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi | Public-domain source texts

English prose and verse classics consolidated into a single aggregate dataset.

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Primary source: English aggregate translations | Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi.