Life's A Tragedy

Edmund Spenser, Complaints: The Tears of the Muses:

            For all man's life me seemes a tragedy,
            Full of sad sights and sore catastrophees;
            First comming to the world with weeping eye,
            Where all his dayes, like dolorous trophees,                    160
            Are heapt with spoyles of fortune and of feare,
            And he at last laid forth on balefull beare.

Palladas (tr. Rev. William Shepherd):

            In tears I came into this world of woe;
            In tears I sink into the shades below;
            In tears I pass’d through life’s contracted span—
            Such is the hapless state of feeble man:
            Crawling on earth, his wretched lot he mourns.
            And, thankful, to his native dust returns.

Another translation of the same (found in: Symonds, Studies of The Greek Poets, vol. II. (New York, 1880), ch. XXI., The Anthology, pp. 311-2):