Читать книгу The Unknown Eros - Coventry Patmore - Страница 15

   In the year of the great crime,

When the false English Nobles and their Jew,

By God demented, slew

The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,

One said, Take up thy Song,

That breathes the mild and almost mythic time

Of England’s prime!

But I, Ah, me,

The freedom of the few

That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,

Can song renew?

Ill singing ’tis with blotting prison-bars,

How high soe’er, betwixt us and the stars;

Ill singing ’tis when there are none to hear;

And days are near

When England shall forget

The fading glow which, for a little while,

Illumes her yet,

The lovely smile

That grows so faint and wan,

Her people shouting in her dying ear,

Are not two daws worth two of any swan!

   Ye outlaw’d Best, who yet are bright

With the sunken light,

Whose common style

Is Virtue at her gracious ease,

The flower of olden sanctities,

Ye haply trust, by love’s benignant guile,

To lure the dark and selfish brood

To their own hated good;

Ye haply dream

Your lives shall still their charmful sway sustain,

Unstifled by the fever’d steam

That rises from the plain.

Know, ’twas the force of function high,

In corporate exercise, and public awe

Of Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s Law

That Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign,

Which kept you in your sky!

But, when the sordid Trader caught

The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,

And soon, to the Mechanic vain,

Sold the proud toy for nought,

Your charm was broke, your task was sped,

Your beauty, with your honour, dead,

And though you still are dreaming sweet

Of being even now not less

Than Gods and Goddesses, ye shall not long so cheat

Your hearts of their due heaviness.

Go, get you for your evil watching shriven!

Leave to your lawful Master’s itching hands

Your unking’d lands,

But keep, at least, the dignity

Of deigning not, for his smooth use, to be,

Voteless, the voted delegates

Of his strange interests, loves and hates.

In sackcloth, or in private strife

With private ill, ye may please Heaven,

And soothe the coming pangs of sinking life;

And prayer perchance may win

A term to God’s indignant mood

And the orgies of the multitude,

Which now begin;

But do not hope to wave the silken rag

Of your unsanction’d flag,

And so to guide

The great ship, helmless on the swelling tide

Of that presumptuous Sea,

Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly bright

With lights innumerable that give no light,

Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right,

Rejoicing to be free.

   And, now, because the dark comes on apace

When none can work for fear,

And Liberty in every Land lies slain,

And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,

And heavy prophecies, suspended long

At supplication of the righteous few,

And so discredited, to fulfilment throng,

Restrain’d no more by faithful prayer or tear,

And the dread baptism of blood seems near

That brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace,

Breathless be song,

And let Christ’s own look through

The darkness, suddenly increased,

To the gray secret lingering in the East.