The Two Bulls and a Frog

Fable by Jean De La Fontaine Collection The FablesThemes Animals, Politics, SatirePeriod 17th century

Two Bulls were fighting over who would possess
A Heifer along with the empire.
A Frog sighed over it.
“What is the matter?” someone from the
Croaking folk began to say to her.
And do you not see, she said,
That the end of this quarrel
Will be the exile of one; that the other, driving him out,
Will make him renounce the flowering fields?
He will no longer reign over the grass of the meadows,
He will come into our marshes to reign over the reeds,
And trampling us underfoot down to the bottom of the waters,
Now one, and then the other, we shall have to suffer
From the combat caused by Madame the Heifer.
This fear was of good sense.
One of the Bulls to their dwelling
Went to hide at their expense:
He was crushing twenty of them an hour.
Alas! we see that in every age
The small have suffered from the follies of the great.

Jean de La Fontaine

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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