Читать книгу The Poems of Madison Cawein. Volume 2 (of 5) - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 20

An elf there is who stables the hot

Red wasp that sucks on the apricot;

An elf, who rowels his spiteful bay,

Like a mote on a ray, away, away;

An elf, who saddles the hornet lean

And dins i’ the ear o’ the swinging bean;

Who straddles, with cap cocked, all awry,

The bottle-green back o’ the dragon-fly.

And this is the elf who sips and sips

From clover-horns whence the perfume drips;

And, drunk with dew, in the glimmering gloam

Awaits the wild-bee’s coming home;

In ambush lies where none may see,

And robs the caravan bumblebee:

Gold bags of honey the bees must pay

To the bandit elf of the fairy-way.

Another ouphen the butterflies know,

Who paints their wings with the hues that glow

On blossoms: squeezing from tubes of dew

Pansy colors of every hue

On his bloom’s pied pallet, he paints the wings

Of the butterflies, moths, and other things.

This is the elf that the hollyhocks hear,

Who dangles a brilliant in each one’s ear;

Teases at noon the pane’s green fly,

And lights at night the glow-worm’s eye.

But the dearest elf, so the poets say,

Is the elf who hides in an eye of gray;

Who curls in a dimple or slips along

The strings of a lute to a lover’s song;

Who smiles in her smile and frowns in her frown,

And dreams in the scent of her glove or gown;

Hides and beckons, as all may note,

In the bloom or the bow of a maiden’s throat.