Читать книгу The Victories of Love, and Other Poems - Coventry Patmore - Страница 9

Religion, duty, books, work, friends,—

’Tis good advice, but there it ends.

I’m sick for what these have not got.

Send no more books: they help me not;

I do my work: the void’s there still

Which carefullest duty cannot fill.

What though the inaugural hour of right

Comes ever with a keen delight?

Little relieves the labour’s heat;

Disgust oft crowns it when complete;

And life, in fact, is not less dull

For being very dutiful.

‘The stately homes of England,’ lo,

‘How beautiful they stand!’  They owe

How much to nameless things like me

Their beauty of security!

But who can long a low toil mend

By looking to a lofty end?

And let me, since ’tis truth, confess

The void’s not fill’d by godliness.

God is a tower without a stair,

And His perfection, love’s despair.

’Tis He shall judge me when I die;

He suckles with the hissing fly

The spider; gazes calmly down.

Whilst rapine grips the helpless town.

His vast love holds all this and more.

In consternation I adore.

Nor can I ease this aching gulf

With friends, the pictures of myself.

   Then marvel not that I recur

From each and all of these to her.

For more of heaven than her have I

No sensitive capacity.

Had I but her, ah, what the gain

Of owning aught but that domain!

Nay, heaven’s extent, however much,

Cannot be more than many such;

And, she being mine, should God to me

Say ‘Lo! my Child, I give to thee

‘All heaven besides,’ what could I then,

But, as a child, to Him complain

That whereas my dear Father gave

A little space for me to have

In His great garden, now, o’erblest,

I’ve that, indeed, but all the rest,

Which, somehow, makes it seem I’ve got

All but my only cared-for plot.

Enough was that for my weak hand

To tend, my heart to understand.

   Oh, the sick fact, ’twixt her and me

There’s naught, and half a world of sea.