Читать книгу The Years Between - Rudyard Kipling - Страница 15

A tinker out of Bedford,

A vagrant oft in quod,

A private under Fairfax,

A minister of God —

Two hundred years and thirty

Ere Armageddon came

His single hand portrayed it,

And Bunyan was his name!

He mapped, for those who follow,

The world in which we are —

'This famous town of Mansoul'

That takes the Holy War

Her true and traitor people,

The gates along her wall,

From Eye Gate unto Feel Gate,

John Bunyan showed them all.

All enemy divisions,

Recruits of every class,

And highly-screened positions

For flame or poison-gas,

The craft that we call modern,

The crimes that we call new,

John Bunyan had 'em typed and filed

In Sixteen Eighty-two

Likewise the Lords of Looseness

That hamper faith and works,

The Perseverance-Doubters,

And Present-Comfort shirks,

With brittle intellectuals

Who crack beneath a strain —

John Bunyan met that helpful set

In Charles the Second's reign.

Emmanuel's vanguard dying

For right and not for rights,

My Lord Apollyon lying

To the State-kept Stockholmites,

The Pope, the swithering Neutrals,

The Kaiser and his Gott —

Their rôles, their goals, their naked souls —

He knew and drew the lot.

Now he hath left his quarters,

In Bunhill Fields to lie.

The wisdom that he taught us

Is proven prophecy —

One watchword through our armies,

One answer from our lands —

'No dealings with Diabolus

As long as Mansoul stands.

A pedlar from a hovel,

The lowest of the low,

The father of the Novel,

Salvation's first Defoe,

Eight blinded generations

Ere Armageddon came,

He showed us how to meet it,

And Bunyan was his name!