Читать книгу The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Volume 1 of 8. Poems Lyrical and Narrative - Yeats William Butler, William Butler Yeats - Страница 38

I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods

Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees

Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away

The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness

That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile

Tara uprooted, and new commonness

Upon the throne and crying about the streets

And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,

Because it is alone of all things happy.

I am contented for I know that Quiet

Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart

Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,

Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs

A cloudy quiver over Parc-na-Lee.

I thought of your beauty, and this arrow,

Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.

There’s no man may look upon her, no man;

As when newly grown to be a woman,

Blossom pale, she pulled down the pale blossom

At the moth hour and hid it in her bosom.

This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason

I could weep that the old is out of season.

One that is ever kind said yesterday:

‘Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey,

And little shadows come about her eyes;

Time can but make it easier to be wise,

Though now it’s hard, till trouble is at an end;

And so be patient, be wise and patient, friend.’

But, heart, there is no comfort, not a grain;

Time can but make her beauty over again,

Because of that great nobleness of hers;

The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs

Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways,

When all the wild summer was in her gaze.

O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,

You’d know the folly of being comforted.

I thought to fly to her when the end of day

Awakens an old memory, and say,

‘Your strength, that is so lofty and fierce and kind,

It might call up a new age, calling to mind

The queens that were imagined long ago,

Is but half yours: he kneaded in the dough

Through the long years of youth, and who would have thought

It all, and more than it all, would come to naught,

And that dear words meant nothing?’ But enough,

For when we have blamed the wind we can blame love;

Or, if there needs be more, be nothing said

That would be harsh for children that have strayed.

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief dreamy kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds,

‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,

I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,

For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’

The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,

And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

I know of the leafy paths that the witches take,

Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,

And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;

I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind

Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool

On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round

Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.

A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound

Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind

With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;

I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.

No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;

The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said: ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.’

That woman then

Murmured with her young voice, for whose mild sake

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache

In finding that it’s young and mild and low:

‘There is one thing that all we women know,

Although we never heard of it at school —

That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I said: ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be

So much compounded of high courtesy

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks

Precedents out of beautiful old books;

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears;

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary hearted as that hollow moon.

The old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,

Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;

Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,

But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes

Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea,

And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say.

Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat;

But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet

Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,

For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;

Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood;

But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood

Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

I heard the old, old men say,

‘Everything alters,

And one by one we drop away.’

They had hands like claws, and their knees

Were twisted like the old thorn trees

By the waters.

I heard the old, old men say,

‘All that’s beautiful drifts away

Like the waters.’

I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde,

Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle,

Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while;

Nor Ulad, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind,

Nor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart;

Land-under-Wave, where out of the moon’s light and the sun’s

Seven old sisters wind the threads of the long-lived ones;

Land-of-the-Tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart,

And Wood-of-Wonders, where one kills an ox at dawn,

To find it when night falls laid on a golden bier:

Therein are many queens like Branwen and Guinivere;

And Niamh and Laban and Fand, who could change to an otter or fawn,

And the wood-woman, whose lover was changed to a blue-eyed hawk;

And whether I go in my dreams by woodland, or dun, or shore,

Or on the unpeopled waves with kings to pull at the oar,

I hear the harp-string praise them, or hear their mournful talk.

Because of a story I heard under the thin horn

Of the third moon, that hung between the night and the day,

To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay,

Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.

O hurry to the water amid the trees,

For there the tall deer and his leman sigh

When they have but looked upon their images,

O that none ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed,

Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,

When the sun looked out of his golden hood,

O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the hollow wood, for there

I will drive out the deer and moon and cry —