Читать книгу The City of Dreadful Night - Thomson James - Страница 3

  The City is of Night; perchance of Death

    But certainly of Night; for never there

  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath

    After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:

  The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity

  The sun has never visited that city,

    For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

  Dissolveth like a dream of night away;

    Though present in distempered gloom of thought

  And deadly weariness of heart all day.

    But when a dream night after night is brought

  Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many

  Recur each year for several years, can any

    Discern that dream from real life in aught?

  For life is but a dream whose shapes return,

    Some frequently, some seldom, some by night

  And some by day, some night and day: we learn,

    The while all change and many vanish quite,

  In their recurrence with recurrent changes

  A certain seeming order; where this ranges

    We count things real; such is memory's might.

  A river girds the city west and south,

    The main north channel of a broad lagoon,

  Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;

    Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon

  For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges;

  Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,

    Connect the town and islet suburbs strewn.

  Upon an easy slope it lies at large

    And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest

  Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.

    A trackless wilderness rolls north and west,

  Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains,

  Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains;

    And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.

  The city is not ruinous, although

    Great ruins of an unremembered past,

  With others of a few short years ago

    More sad, are found within its precincts vast.

  The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement

  In house or palace front from roof to basement

    Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

  The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,

    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense

  Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.

    The silence which benumbs or strains the sense

  Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:

  Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,

    Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

  Yet as in some necropolis you find

    Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,

  So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind

    Like tragic masks of stone.  With weary tread,

  Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,

  Or sit foredone and desolately ponder

    Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

  Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,

    A woman rarely, now and then a child:

  A child!  If here the heart turns sick with ruth

    To see a little one from birth defiled,

  Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish

  Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish

    To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

  They often murmur to themselves, they speak

    To one another seldom, for their woe

  Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak

    Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow

  To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,

  Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,

    To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.

  The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;

    There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;

  The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

    A night seems termless hell.  This dreadful strain

  Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,

  Or which some moments' stupor but increases,

    This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

  They leave all hope behind who enter there:

    One certitude while sane they cannot leave,

  One anodyne for torture and despair;

    The certitude of Death, which no reprieve

  Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,

  But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render

    That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave1