Читать книгу Poems - Arnold Matthew - Страница 19

So rest, forever rest, O princely pair!

In your high church, ’mid the still mountain-air,

Where horn, and hound, and vassals, never come.

Only the blessed saints are smiling dumb

From the rich painted windows of the nave

On aisle, and transept, and your marble grave;

Where thou, young prince, shalt never more arise

From the fringed mattress where thy duchess lies,

On autumn-mornings, when the bugle sounds,

And ride across the drawbridge with thy hounds

To hunt the boar in the crisp woods till eve;

And thou, O princess, shalt no more receive,

Thou and thy ladies, in the hall of state,

The jaded hunters with their bloody freight,

Coming benighted to the castle-gate.

So sleep, forever sleep, O marble pair!

Or, if ye wake, let it be then, when fair

On the carved western front a flood of light

Streams from the setting sun, and colors bright

Prophets, transfigured saints, and martyrs brave,

In the vast western window of the nave;

And on the pavement round the tomb there glints

A checker-work of glowing sapphire-tints,

And amethyst, and ruby—then unclose

Your eyelids on the stone where ye repose,

And from your broidered pillows lift your heads,

And rise upon your cold white marble beds;

And looking down on the warm rosy tints

Which checker, at your feet, the illumined flints,

Say, What is this? we are in bliss—forgiven— Behold the pavement of the courts of heaven! Or let it be on autumn-nights, when rain Doth rustlingly above your heads complain On the smooth leaden roof, and on the walls Shedding her pensive light at intervals The moon through the clere-story windows shines, And the wind washes through the mountain-pines— Then, gazing up ’mid the dim pillars high, The foliaged marble forest where ye lie, Hush, ye will say, it is eternity! This is the glimmering verge of heaven, and these The columns of the heavenly palaces. And in the sweeping of the wind your ear The passage of the angels’ wings will hear, And on the lichen-crusted leads above The rustle of the eternal rain of love.