Читать книгу Poems, 1908-1919 - Drinkwater John - Страница 13

Here in the unfrequented noon,

In the green hermitage of June,

While overhead a rustling wing

Minds me of birds that do not sing

Until the cooler eve rewakes

The service of melodious brakes,

And thoughts are lonely rangers, here,

In shelter of the primrose year,

I curiously meditate

Our brief and variable state.

I think how many are alive

Who better in the grave would thrive,

If some so long a sleep might give

Better instruction how to live;

I think what splendours had been said

By darlings now untimely dead

Had death been wise in choice of these,

And made exchange of obsequies.

I think what loss to government

It is that good men are content —

Well knowing that an evil will

Is folly-stricken too, and still

Itself considers only wise

For all rebukes and surgeries —

That evil men should raise their pride

To place and fortune undefied.

I think how daily we beguile

Our brains, that yet a little while

And all our congregated schemes

And our perplexity of dreams,

Shall come to whole and perfect state.

I think, however long the date

Of life may be, at last the sun

Shall pass upon campaigns undone.

I look upon the world and see

A world colonial to me,

Whereof I am the architect,

And principal and intellect,

A world whose shape and savour spring

Out of my lone imagining,

A world whose nature is subdued

For ever to my instant mood,

And only beautiful can be

Because of beauty is in me.

And then I know that every mind

Among the millions of my kind

Makes earth his own particular

And privately created star,

That earth has thus no single state,

Being every man articulate.

Till thought has no horizon then

I try to think how many men

There are to make an earth apart

In symbol of the urgent heart,

For there are forty in my street,

And seven hundred more in Greet,

And families at Luton Hoo,

And there are men in China, too.

And what immensity is this

That is but a parenthesis

Set in a little human thought,

Before the body comes to naught.

There at the bottom of the copse

I see a field of turnip tops,

I see the cropping cattle pass

There in another field, of grass.

And fields and fields, with seven towns,

A river, and a flight of downs,

Steeples for all religious men,

Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten,

A mighty span that curves away

Into blue beauty, and I lay

All this as quartered on a sphere

Hung huge in space, a thing of fear

Vast as the circle of the sky

Completed to the astonished eye;

And then I think that all I see,

Whereof I frame immensity

Globed for amazement, is no more

Than a shire’s corner, and that four

Great shires being ten times multiplied

Are small on the Atlantic tide

As an emerald on a silver bowl …

And the Atlantic to the whole

Sweep of this tributary star

That is our earth is but … and far

Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind

Seeks to conceive the unconfined.

I think of Time. How, when his wing

Composes all our quarrelling

In some green corner where May leaves

Are loud with blackbirds on all eves,

And all the dust that was our bones

Is underneath memorial stones,

Then shall old jealousies, while we

Lie side by side most quietly,

Be but oblivion’s fools, and still

When curious pilgrims ask – “What skill

Had these that from oblivion saves?” —

My song shall sing above our graves.

I think how men of gentle mind,

And friendly will, and honest kind,

Deny their nature and appear

Fellows of jealousy and fear;

Having single faith, and natural wit

To measure truth and cherish it,

Yet, strangely, when they build in thought,

Twisting the honesty that wrought

In the straight motion of the heart,

Into its feigning counterpart

That is the brain’s betrayal of

The simple purposes of love;

And what yet sorrier decline

Is theirs when, eager to confine

No more within the silent brain

Its habit, thought seeks birth again

In speech, as honesty has done

In thought; then even what had won

From heart to brain fades and is lost

In this pretended pentecost,

This their forlorn captivity

To speech, who have not learnt to be

Lords of the word, nor kept among

The sterner climates of the tongue …

So truth is in their hearts, and then

Falls to confusion in the brain,

And, fading through this mid-eclipse,

It perishes upon the lips.

I think how year by year I still

Find working in my dauntless will

Sudden timidities that are

Merely the echo of some far

Forgotten tyrannies that came

To youth’s bewilderment and shame;

That yet a magisterial gown,

Being worn by one of no renown

And half a generation less

In years than I, can dispossess

Something my circumspecter mood

Of excellence and quietude,

And if a Bishop speaks to me

I tremble with propriety.

I think how strange it is that he

Who goes most comradely with me

In beauty’s worship, takes delight

In shows that to my eager sight

Are shadows and unmanifest,

While beauty’s favour and behest

To me in motion are revealed

That is against his vision sealed;

Yet is our hearts’ necessity

Not twofold, but a common plea

That chaos come to continence,

Whereto the arch-intelligence

Richly in divers voices makes

Its answer for our several sakes.

I see the disinherited

And long procession of the dead,

Who have in generations gone

Held fugitive dominion

Of this same primrose pasturage

That is my momentary wage.

I see two lovers move along

These shadowed silences of song,

With spring in blossom at their feet

More incommunicably sweet

To their hearts’ more magnificence,

Than to the common courts of sense,

Till joy his tardy closure tells

With coming of the curfew bells.

I see the knights of spur and sword

Crossing the little woodland ford,

Riding in ghostly cavalcade

On some unchronicled crusade.

I see the silent hunter go

In cloth of yeoman green, with bow

Strung, and a quiver of grey wings.

I see the little herd who brings

His cattle homeward, while his sire

Makes bivouac in Warwickshire

This night, the liege and loyal man

Of Cavalier or Puritan.

And as they pass, the nameless dead,

Unsung, uncelebrate, and sped

Upon an unremembered hour

As any twelvemonth fallen flower,

I think how strangely yet they live

For all their days were fugitive.

I think how soon we too shall be

A story with our ancestry.

I think what miracle has been

That you whose love among this green

Delightful solitude is still

The stay and substance of my will,

The dear custodian of my song,

My thrifty counsellor and strong,

Should take the time of all time’s tide

That was my season, to abide

On earth also; that we should be

Charted across eternity

To one elect and happy day

Of yellow primroses in May.

The clock is calling five o’clock,

And Nonesopretty brings her flock

To fold, and Tom comes back from town

With hose and ribbons worth a crown,

And duly at The Old King’s Head

They gather now to daily bread,

And I no more may meditate

Our brief and variable state.