Читать книгу Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses - George Allan England - Страница 3

Hesperides.

Table of Contents

I

NOW once again the angry sun

Wheels up the heaven his tireless way;

Once more we strangling herds of men

Wake to our labours never-done,

Rise up to toil another day.

Down flares the heat on town and street,

Wide-warping pillar, span and plinth;

Once more my burning, wearied eyes

Within this monstrous labyrinth

Meet the mad heat that stifles me,

And O, my baffled spirit flies

In dreams to thy green wood and thee,

To thee!... To thee!...

II

My pavement-wearied feet again

Tread the rough streets whose ways are pain,

Hot with the sun’s last sullen beam,

And yet—I dream!

Dream when I wake, and at high, blinding Noon,

Or when the moon

Mocks the sad City in her sullen night

That burns too bright!

So sweet my visions seem

That from this sordid smoke and dust I turn,

Turn where the dim Wood-world calls out to me

And where the forest-virgins I half see

With green mysterious fingers beckoning!

Where vine-wreathed woodland altars sunlit burn,

Or Dryads weave their mystic rounds and sing,

Sing high, sing low, with magic cadences

That once the wild oaks of Dodona heard;

And every wood-note bids me burst asunder

The bonds that hold me from the leaf-hid bird!

I quaff thee, O Nepenthe! Ah, the wonder

Grows that there be who scorn not wealth and ease,

Who still will choose the street-life, rough and blurred,

Who will not quest you, O Hesperides!...

III

And now, and now... I feel the forest-moss!

O, on these moss-beds let me lie with Pan,

Twined with the ivy-vine in tendrilled curls!

And I will hold all gold that hampers man

But the base ashes of a barren dross!

On with the love-dance of the pagan girls!

The pagan girls with lips all rosy-red,

With breasts up-girt and foreheads garlanded!

With fair white foreheads nobly garlanded!

With sandalled feet that weave the magic ring

Now ... let them sing,

And I will pipe a song that all may hear,

To bid them mind the time of my wild rhyme!

Away! Away! Beware our mystic trees!

Who will not quest you, O Hesperides?...

IV

Great men of song, what sing ye? Woodland meadows?

Rocks, trees and rills where sunlight glints to gold?

Sing ye the hills adown whose sides blue shadows

Creep when the westering day is growing old?

Sing ye the brooks where in the purling shallows

The small fish dart and gleam?

Sing ye the pale green tresses of the willows

That stoop to kiss the stream?

Or sing ye burning streets and sweating toil

Where we spawned swarms of men, unendingly,

Above, below, in mart and workshop’s moil

Have quite forgot thee, O mine Arcady?...