Читать книгу The Unknown Eros - Coventry Patmore - Страница 11

   Is this the portent of the day nigh past,

And of a restless grave

O’er which the eternal sadness gathers fast;

Or but the heaped wave

Of some chance, wandering tide,

Such as that world of awe

Whose circuit, listening to a foreign law,

Conjunctures ours at unguess’d dates and wide,

Does in the Spirit’s tremulous ocean draw,

To pass unfateful on, and so subside?

Thee, whom ev’n more than Heaven loved I have,

And yet have not been true

Even to thee,

I, dreaming, night by night, seek now to see,

And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursue

Thro’ sordid streets and lanes

And houses brown and bare

And many a haggard stair

Ochrous with ancient stains,

And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,

In whose unhaunted glooms

Dead pauper generations, witless of the sun,

Their course have run;

And ofttimes my pursuit

Is check’d of its dear fruit

By things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,

Furious that I should keep

Their forfeit power to weep,

And mock, with living fear, their mournful malice thin.

But ever, at the last, my way I win

To where, with perfectly sad patience, nurst

By sorry comfort of assured worst,

Ingrain’d in fretted cheek and lips that pine,

On pallet poor

Thou lyest, stricken sick,

Beyond love’s cure,

By all the world’s neglect, but chiefly mine.

Then sweetness, sweeter than my tongue can tell,

Does in my bosom well,

And tears come free and quick

And more and more abound

For piteous passion keen at having found,

After exceeding ill, a little good;

A little good

Which, for the while,

Fleets with the current sorrow of the blood,

Though no good here has heart enough to smile.