Читать книгу Collected Poems: Volume One - Alfred Noyes - Страница 35

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Apes and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong-Kong,

Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song,

Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the East,

O, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast.

Or is it an elephant, white as milk and bearing a severed head

That tatters his broad soft wrinkled flank in tawdry patches of red,

With a negro giant to walk beside and a temple dome above,

Where ruby and emerald shatter the sun—is it these that should please my love?

Or is it a palace of pomegranates, where ivory-limbed young slaves

Lure a luxury out of the noon in the swooning fountain's waves;

Or couch like cats and sun themselves on the warm white marble brink?

O, Love has little to ask of these, this day in May, I think.

Is it Lebanon cedars or purple fruits of the honeyed southron air,

Spikenard, saffron, roses of Sharon, cinnamon, calamus, myrrh,

A bed of spices, a fountain of waters, or the wild white wings of a dove,

Now, when the winter is over and gone, is it these that should please my love?

The leaves outburst on the hazel-bough and the hawthorn's heaped wi' flower,

And God has bidden the crisp clouds build my love a lordlier tower,

Taller than Lebanon, whiter than snow, in the fresh blue skies above;

And the wild rose wakes in the winding lanes of the radiant land I love.

Apes and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong-Kong, Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song, Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the East, O, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast.