Читать книгу English Verse - Raymond Macdonald Alden - Страница 38

(With feminine ending:)

Come on then, ye dwellers by nature in darkness, and like to the leaves' generations,

That are little of might, that are moulded of mire, unenduring and shadowlike nations,

Poor plumeless ephemerals, comfortless mortals, as visions of creatures fast fleeing,

Lift up your mind unto us that are deathless, and dateless the date of our being.

(Swinburne: The Birds, from Aristophanes.)

Of this translation Mr. Swinburne says that it was undertaken from a consideration of the fact that the "marvellous metrical invention of the anapestic heptameter was almost exactly reproducible in a language to which all variations and combinations of anapestic, iambic, or trochaic metre are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent." … "I have not attempted," he says further, "the impossible and undesirable task of reproducing the rare exceptional effect of a line overcharged on purpose with a preponderance of heavy-footed spondees. … My main desire … was to renew as far as possible for English ears the music of this resonant and triumphant metre, which goes ringing at full gallop as of horses who

'dance as 'twere to the music

Their own hoofs make.'"

(Studies in Song, p. 68.)