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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some fragments of the (philosophic) poetry of Parmenides, with philosophic commentary. They say about Parmenides:

Parmenides of Elea, active in the earlier part of the 5th c. BCE., authored a difficult metaphysical poem that has earned him a reputation as early Greek philosophy’s most profound and challenging thinker. His philosophical stance has typically been understood as at once extremely paradoxical and yet crucial for the broader development of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics. He has been seen as a metaphysical monist (of one stripe or another) who so challenged the naïve cosmological theories of his predecessors that his major successors among the Presocratics were all driven to develop more sophisticated physical theories in response to his arguments.

Copyright © 2008 by John Palmer

© Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University

Here are some lines of his poetry:

And the goddess received me kindly, and in her hand she took/ my right hand, and she spoke and addressed me thus:/ “O young man, accompanied by immortal charioteers/ [25] and mares who bear you as you arrive at our abode,/ welcome, since a fate by no means ill sent you ahead to travel/ this way (for surely it is far from the track of humans),/ but Right and Justice did.” (Fr. 1.1-28a)

You must needs learn all things,/ both the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality/ [30] and the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine conviction./ Nonetheless these things too will you learn, how what they resolved/ had actually to be, all through all pervading. (Fr. 1.28b-32)

Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for thinking:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for it attends upon true reality,/ [5] but the other, that [it] is not and that [it] must not be,/ this, I tell you, is a path wholly without report:/ for neither could you apprehend what is not, for it is not to be accomplished,/ nor could you indicate it. (Fr. 2)

It is necessary to say and to think that What Is is; for it is to be,/ but nothing it is not. These things I bid you ponder./ For I shall begin for you from this first way of inquiry,/ then yet again from that along which mortals who know nothing/ [5] wander two-headed: for haplessness in their/ breasts directs wandering thought. They are borne along/ deaf and blind at once, bedazzled, undiscriminating hordes,/ who have supposed that it is and is not the same/ and not the same; but the path of all these turns back on itself. (Fr. 6, supplementing the lacuna at the end of fr. 6.3 with arxô and taking s’ earlier in the line as an elision of soi, as per Nehamas 1981, 103-5; cf. the similar proposal at Cordero 1984, ch. 3, expanding parts of Cordero 1979.)

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