Читать книгу Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces - Thomas Hardy, Eleanor Bron, Томас Харди (Гарди) - Страница 24

“It is not death that harrows us,” they lipped,

“The soundless cell is in itself relief,

For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped

At unawares, and at its best but brief.”

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone,

Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye,

As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone

From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead,

They should not, like the many, be at rest,

But stray as apparitions; hence I said,

“Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

“We are among the few death sets not free,

The hurt, misrepresented names, who come

At each year’s brink, and cry to History

To do them justice, or go past them dumb.

“We are stript of rights; our shames lie unredressed,

Our deeds in full anatomy are not shown,

Our words in morsels merely are expressed

On the scriptured page, our motives blurred, unknown.”

Then all these shaken slighted visitants sped

Into the vague, and left me musing there

On fames that well might instance what they had said,

Until the New-Year’s dawn strode up the air.