Читать книгу The Unknown Eros - Coventry Patmore - Страница 8

   Darling, with hearts conjoin’d in such a peace

That Hope, so not to cease,

Must still gaze back,

And count, along our love’s most happy track,

The landmarks of like inconceiv’d increase,

Promise me this:

If thou alone should’st win

God’s perfect bliss,

And I, beguiled by gracious-seeming sin,

Say, loving too much thee,

Love’s last goal miss,

And any vows may then have memory,

Never, by grief for what I bear or lack,

To mar thy joyance of heav’n’s jubilee.

Promise me this;

For else I should be hurl’d,

Beyond just doom

And by thy deed, to Death’s interior gloom,

From the mild borders of the banish’d world

Wherein they dwell

Who builded not unalterable fate

On pride, fraud, envy, cruel lust, or hate;

Yet loved too laxly sweetness and heart’s ease,

And strove the creature more than God to please.

   For such as these

Loss without measure, sadness without end!

Yet not for this do thou disheaven’d be

With thinking upon me.

Though black, when scann’d from heaven’s surpassing bright,

This might mean light,

Foil’d with the dim days of mortality.

For God is everywhere.

Go down to deepest Hell, and He is there,

And, as a true but quite estranged Friend,

He works, ’gainst gnashing teeth of devilish ire,

With love deep hidden lest it be blasphemed,

If possible, to blend

Ease with the pangs of its inveterate fire;

Yea, in the worst

And from His Face most wilfully accurst

Of souls in vain redeem’d,

He does with potions of oblivion kill

Remorse of the lost Love that helps them still.

   Apart from these,

Near the sky-borders of that banish’d world,

Wander pale spirits among willow’d leas,

Lost beyond measure, sadden’d without end,

But since, while erring most, retaining yet

Some ineffectual fervour of regret,

Retaining still such weal

As spurned Lovers feel,

Preferring far to all the world’s delight

Their loss so infinite,

Or Poets, when they mark

In the clouds dun

A loitering flush of the long sunken sun,

And turn away with tears into the dark.

   Know, Dear, these are not mine

But Wisdom’s words, confirmed by divine

Doctors and Saints, though fitly seldom heard

Save in their own prepense-occulted word,

Lest fools be fool’d the further by false hope,

And wrest sweet knowledge to their own decline;

And (to approve I speak within my scope)

The Mistress of that dateless exile gray

Is named in surpliced Schools Tristitia.

   But, O, my Darling, look in thy heart and see

How unto me,

Secured of my prime care, thy happy state,

In the most unclean cell

Of sordid Hell,

And worried by the most ingenious hate,

It never could be anything but well,

Nor from my soul, full of thy sanctity,

Such pleasure die

As the poor harlot’s, in whose body stirs

The innocent life that is and is not hers:

Unless, alas, this fount of my relief

By thy unheavenly grief

Were closed.

So, with a consecrating kiss

And hearts made one in past all previous peace,

And on one hope reposed,

Promise me this!