Читать книгу Collected Poems: Volume Two - Alfred Noyes - Страница 17

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Three long isles of sunset-cloud,

Poised in an ocean of gold,

Floated away in the west

As the long train southward rolled;

And through the gleam and shade of the panes,

While meadow and wood went by,

Across the streaming earth

We watched the steadfast sky.

Dark before the westward window,

Heavy and bloated, rolled

The face of a drunken woman

Nodding against the gold;

Dark before the infinite glory,

With bleared and leering eyes,

It stupidly lurched and nodded

Against the tender skies.

What had ye done to her, masters of men, That her head be bowed down thus— Thus for your golden vespers, And deepening angelus?

Dark, besotted, malignant, vacant,

Slobbering, wrinkled, old,

Weary and wickedly smiling,

She nodded against the gold.

Pitiful, loathsome, maudlin, lonely,

Her moist, inhuman eyes

Blinked at the flies on the window,

And could not see the skies.

As a beast that turns and returns to a mirror

And will not see its face,

Her eyes rejected the sunset,

Her soul lay dead in its place,

Dead in the furrows and folds of her flesh

As a corpse lies lapped in the shroud;

Silently floated beside her

The isles of sunset-cloud.

What had ye done to her, years upon years, That her head should be bowed down thus— Thus for your golden vespers, And deepening angelus?

Her nails were blackened and split with labour,

Her back was heavily bowed;

Silently floated beside her

The isles of sunset-cloud.

Over their tapering streaks of lilac,

In breathless depths afar,

Bright as the tear of an angel

Glittered a lonely star.

While the hills and the streams of the world went past us,

And the long train roared and rolled

Southward, and dusk was falling,

She nodded against the gold.