Verse 12

¹²Unable to keep his family, luckless, his effort come to nothing, stripped of every fortune, a poor wretch with his wits gone, he broods and sighs. ¹³And now that he cannot keep them, his wife and the others no longer show him the regard they showed before, as ploughmen have no regard for a worn-out ox. ¹⁴Even then no disgust with it is born in him. Kept now by the very people he kept, made ugly by old age, he sits in the house with his face towards death, ¹⁵taking what is thrown down to him in contempt, like the dog at the gate; sick, the fire in him gone low, eating little and moving little. ¹⁶His eyes start out as the breath rises, his passages are stopped with phlegm, coughing and gasping wear him down, and there is a rattling in his throat.

¹⁷He lies there ringed by his grieving people, and though they speak to him he says nothing, for he has passed into the power of the noose of time. ¹⁸So, with his whole self given over to keeping his family and his senses never mastered, he dies among his weeping own, his mind struck away by the great pain.