Читать книгу Poems of the Past and the Present - Thomas Hardy, Eleanor Bron, Томас Харди (Гарди) - Страница 13

   O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,

   Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee

When from Torino’s track I saw thy face first flash on me.

   And multimarbled Genova the Proud,

   Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed,

I first beheld thee clad – not as the Beauty but the Dowd.

   Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit

   On housebacks pink, green, ochreous – where a slit

Shoreward ’twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.

   And thereacross waved fishwives’ high-hung smocks,

   Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;

Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:

   Whereat I grieve, Superba!.. Afterhours

   Within Palazzo Doria’s orange bowers

Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.

   But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see,

   Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be

Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee.

Somewhere afield here something lies

In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust

That moved a poet to prophecies —

A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust

The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,

And made immortal through times to be; —

Though it only lived like another bird,

And knew not its immortality.

Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell —

A little ball of feather and bone;

And how it perished, when piped farewell,

And where it wastes, are alike unknown.

Maybe it rests in the loam I view,

Maybe it throbs in a myrtle’s green,

Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue

Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

Go find it, faeries, go and find

That tiny pinch of priceless dust,

And bring a casket silver-lined,

And framed of gold that gems encrust;

And we will lay it safe therein,

And consecrate it to endless time;

For it inspired a bard to win

Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline

Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,

Till came a child who showed an ancient coin

That bore the image of a Constantine.

She lightly passed; nor did she once opine

How, better than all books, she had raised for me

In swift perspective Europe’s history

Through the vast years of Cæsar’s sceptred line.

For in my distant plot of English loam

’Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find

Coins of like impress.  As with one half blind

Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home

In that mute moment to my opened mind

The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,

And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,

Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,

We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile

The outer sense, and shape itself as though

It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow

Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,

Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:

It stirred me as I stood, in Cæsar’s house,

Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

And blended pulsing life with lives long done,

Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry

Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;

Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome

Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

And cracking frieze and rotten metope

Express, as though they were an open tome

Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;

“Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”

And yet within these ruins’ very shade

The singing workmen shape and set and join

Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin

With no apparent sense that years abrade,

Though each rent wall their feeble works invade

Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day,

And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,

And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,

Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,

But each and the whole – an essence of all the Nine;

With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,

A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

“Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she.

“Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy!

I worship each and each; in the morning one,

And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

“To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth

Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?”

– “Be not perturbed,” said she.  “Though apart in fame,

As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

– “But my loves go further – to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,

The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim —

Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!”

– “Nay, wight, thou sway’st not.  These are but phases of one;

“And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,

One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be —

Extern to thee nothing.  Grieve not, nor thyself becall,

Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!”

      Who, then, was Cestius,

      And what is he to me? —

Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous

      One thought alone brings he.

      I can recall no word

      Of anything he did;

For me he is a man who died and was interred

      To leave a pyramid

      Whose purpose was exprest

      Not with its first design,

Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest

      Two countrymen of mine.

      Cestius in life, maybe,

      Slew, breathed out threatening;

I know not.  This I know: in death all silently

      He does a kindlier thing,

      In beckoning pilgrim feet

      With marble finger high

To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,

      Those matchless singers lie.

      – Say, then, he lived and died

      That stones which bear his name

Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;

      It is an ample fame.

      A spirit seems to pass,

   Formal in pose, but grave and grand withal:

   He contemplates a volume stout and tall,

And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

      Anon the book is closed,

   With “It is finished!”  And at the alley’s end

   He turns, and soon on me his glances bend;

And, as from earth, comes speech – small, muted, yet composed.

      “How fares the Truth now? – Ill?

   – Do pens but slily further her advance?

   May one not speed her but in phrase askance?

Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

      “Still rule those minds on earth

   At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:

   ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world

Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?”

Thirty-two years since, up against the sun,

Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight,

Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,

And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

They were the first by whom the deed was done,

And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight

To that day’s tragic feat of manly might,

As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon

Thou watch’dst each night the planets lift and lower;

Thou gleam’dst to Joshua’s pausing sun and moon,

And brav’dst the tokening sky when Cæsar’s power

Approached its bloody end: yea, saw’st that Noon

When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

When of tender mind and body

   I was moved by minstrelsy,

And that strain “The Bridge of Lodi”

   Brought a strange delight to me.

In the battle-breathing jingle

   Of its forward-footing tune

I could see the armies mingle,

   And the columns cleft and hewn

On that far-famed spot by Lodi

   Where Napoleon clove his way

To his fame, when like a god he

   Bent the nations to his sway.

Hence the tune came capering to me

   While I traced the Rhone and Po;

Nor could Milan’s Marvel woo me

   From the spot englamoured so.

And to-day, sunlit and smiling,

   Here I stand upon the scene,

With its saffron walls, dun tiling,

   And its meads of maiden green,

Even as when the trackway thundered

   With the charge of grenadiers,

And the blood of forty hundred

   Splashed its parapets and piers.

Any ancient crone I’d toady

   Like a lass in young-eyed prime,

Could she tell some tale of Lodi

   At that moving mighty time.

So, I ask the wives of Lodi

   For traditions of that day;

But alas! not anybody

   Seems to know of such a fray.

And they heed but transitory

   Marketings in cheese and meat,

Till I judge that Lodi’s story

   Is extinct in Lodi’s street.

Yet while here and there they thrid them

   In their zest to sell and buy,

Let me sit me down amid them

   And behold those thousands die.

– Not a creature cares in Lodi

   How Napoleon swept each arch,

Or where up and downward trod he,

   Or for his memorial March!

So that wherefore should I be here,

   Watching Adda lip the lea,

When the whole romance to see here

   Is the dream I bring with me?

And why sing “The Bridge of Lodi”

   As I sit thereon and swing,

When none shows by smile or nod he

   Guesses why or what I sing?.

Since all Lodi, low and head ones,

   Seem to pass that story by,

It may be the Lodi-bred ones

   Rate it truly, and not I.

Once engrossing Bridge of Lodi,

   Is thy claim to glory gone?

Must I pipe a palinody,

   Or be silent thereupon?

And if here, from strand to steeple,

   Be no stone to fame the fight,

Must I say the Lodi people

   Are but viewing crime aright?

Nay; I’ll sing “The Bridge of Lodi” —

   That long-loved, romantic thing,

Though none show by smile or nod he

   Guesses why and what I sing!

My ardours for emprize nigh lost

Since Life has bared its bones to me,

I shrink to seek a modern coast

Whose riper times have yet to be;

Where the new regions claim them free

From that long drip of human tears

Which peoples old in tragedy

Have left upon the centuried years.

For, wonning in these ancient lands,

Enchased and lettered as a tomb,

And scored with prints of perished hands,

And chronicled with dates of doom,

Though my own Being bear no bloom

I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,

Give past exemplars present room,

And their experience count as mine.