Читать книгу The Unknown Eros - Coventry Patmore - Страница 5

   I, singularly moved

To love the lovely that are not beloved,

Of all the Seasons, most

Love Winter, and to trace

The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.

It is not death, but plenitude of peace;

And the dim cloud that does the world enfold

Hath less the characters of dark and cold

Than warmth and light asleep,

And correspondent breathing seems to keep

With the infant harvest, breathing soft below

Its eider coverlet of snow.

Nor is in field or garden anything

But, duly look’d into, contains serene

The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,

And evidence of Summer not yet seen.

On every chance-mild day

That visits the moist shaw,

The honeysuckle, ’sdaining to be crost

In urgence of sweet life by sleet or frost,

’Voids the time’s law

With still increase

Of leaflet new, and little, wandering spray;

Often, in sheltering brakes,

As one from rest disturb’d in the first hour,

Primrose or violet bewilder’d wakes,

And deems ’tis time to flower;

Though not a whisper of her voice he hear,

The buried bulb does know

The signals of the year,

And hails far Summer with his lifted spear.

The gorse-field dark, by sudden, gold caprice,

Turns, here and there, into a Jason’s fleece;

Lilies, that soon in Autumn slipp’d their gowns of green,

And vanish’d into earth,

And came again, ere Autumn died, to birth,

Stand full-array’d, amidst the wavering shower,

And perfect for the Summer, less the flower;

In nook of pale or crevice of crude bark,

Thou canst not miss,

If close thou spy, to mark

The ghostly chrysalis,

That, if thou touch it, stirs in its dream dark;

And the flush’d Robin, in the evenings hoar,

Does of Love’s Day, as if he saw it, sing;

But sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer or Spring

Are Winter’s sometime smiles, that seem to well

From infancy ineffable;

Her wandering, languorous gaze,

So unfamiliar, so without amaze,

On the elemental, chill adversity,

The uncomprehended rudeness; and her sigh

And solemn, gathering tear,

And look of exile from some great repose, the sphere

Of ether, moved by ether only, or

By something still more tranquil.