Читать книгу Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces - Thomas Hardy, Eleanor Bron, Томас Харди (Гарди) - Страница 1

Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,

   Dolorous and dear,

Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

   Stretching around,

Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

   Yonder and near,

Blotted to feeble mist.  And the coomb and the upland

   Foliage-crowned,

Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat

   Stroked by the light,

Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

   Meadow or mound.

What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

   Under my sight,

Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

   Lengthening to miles;

What were the re-creations killing the daytime

   As by the night?

O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

   Some as with smiles,

Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

   Over the wrecked

Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,

   Harrowed by wiles.

Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them —

   Halo-bedecked —

And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

   Rigid in hate,

Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

   Dreaded, suspect.

Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

   Further in date;

Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

   Vibrant, beside

Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust

   Now corporate.

Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

   Gnawed by the tide,

Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there

   Guilelessly glad —

Wherefore they knew not – touched by the fringe of an ecstasy

   Scantly descried.

Later images too did the day unfurl me,

   Shadowed and sad,

Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

   Laid now at ease,

Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

   Sepulture-clad.

So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

   Over the leaze,

Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;

   – Yea, as the rhyme

Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness

   Captured me these.

For, their lost revisiting manifestations

   In their own time

Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

   Seeing behind

Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

   Sweet, sad, sublime.

Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

   Stare of the mind

As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast

   Body-borne eyes,

Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

   As living kind.

Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

   In their surmise,

“Ah – whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought

   Round him that looms

Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

   Save a few tombs?”