The Sonnets. Warwick Collins

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ say so freely.’

      To which I answered, ‘Every scribbler in our land is in debt to his great peroration, his mighty line. Where he leads, we others follow.’

      ‘You truly admire Faustus?’ he asked.

      ‘Marlowe is Faustus,’ I replied. ‘They say he necromances spirits, that he is on speaking terms with Mephistopheles.’

      He smiled at that, saying, ‘This … other work that you mentioned at our table –’

      ‘Hero and Leander,’ I said.

      ‘Hero and Leander. What is it, precisely?’

      ‘A poem about love, dwelling much on masculine beauty. It is said that he intends to dedicate it to you.’

      His face lit up. He was addicted to praise.

      ‘To me?’

      ‘So it is said.’

      ‘Yet it is unfinished.’

      I smiled. ‘So it is said.’

      He looked at me searchingly. ‘And you do not mind … a rival for your praise?’

      ‘He has a worthy subject.’

      He paused and considered me. ‘You are honest. You see coldly and clearly, and yet I believe you burn hot inside.’

      I would not deny it. So before him I said, as though in affirmation of a fact, ‘I see clearly and burn hot.’

      That night, after I left my lord’s rooms, I attempted to give some further shape to the thoughts I had earlier that day – that his youth and beauty incited dreams in the observer. Earlier that morning, when he emerged from the lake, there was one more witness than those I had already described. In the dawn mists, a figure was collecting brushwood in some dense, nearby scrub. At first I thought it might have been a boar, rooting in the undergrowth. Despite the low-lying vapour, I could begin to make out an elderly crone, bent-backed, in a grey hood. She had been dragging a sack of brushwood backwards from a thick covert where she had been collecting sticks for firewood.

      The foliage was so dense there that it would have been difficult to lift the sack under the immediate oppression of the overhanging boughs. Once she was out of its entanglements, she intended to lift her load onto her shoulders. So she emerged from the thicket backwards, like some strange animal, hauling her load, wheezing and gasping, at precisely that place on the shore where my lord, unconscious of any other human witness, was approaching after his swim in the lake. I supposed that, suspecting a meeting, I could have warned her of his emergence from the water, but the comical nature of our situation touched me and stimulated my curiosity.

      Perhaps the elderly crone heard the jingle of horses’ bridles, or the splashing of my lord’s feet as he neared the shore, for she seemed suddenly aware of others in her vicinity. She turned round, perplexed, and was faced with an entirely naked youth emerging like a god from the elements.

      Her face, I do recall, was a picture. It was a wonderful old countenance, wrinkled and shriven, but with a clear, bright, and intelligent eye. I know enough of age to appreciate that the inhabiter of that bag of bones was the same being who had danced with graceful feet on the common in her youth.

      For a brief moment her eye surveyed the figure that had risen from the waters – heavy, pale shoulders, long fair hair, the nub between the slender legs – with the purest appreciation.

      Why should either of them have been offended? It is true that he, at first as startled as she, tensed a little from the unexpected meeting; but seeing almost immediately that his witness offered no offence and appeared appreciative of his form, he relaxed, and even lowered the lid of his eye in the form of a rakish wink. For a moment, all that old woman’s Christmases seemed rolled into one. She cackled with pleasure, allowed her eye one more appreciative traverse of his figure, and then – modesty imposing itself at last – turned away to lift the sack onto her back. It seemed she shook with laughter as she slowly disappeared into the mist.

      I handed my lord his clothes. When he had dressed, we rode back through the morning towards the great house.

       Chapter 5

      I HAD BEEN WORKING on the idea of composing a sequence of poems or sonnets addressed to my patron. The sonnet itself had a complex history. According to a prevailing fashion, it was addressed by a poet to a mistress, often one who was out of reach, after whom he yearned, or at least affected to do so for the sake of the fulsome compliments he would bestow upon her. It was a convention which had emerged in part at least from the troubadour tradition of France, and since we English tended to ape French fashions, it had its adherents amongst the nobility. Great ladies found it amusing to be addressed thus, in appropriately lofty language, by one who remained suitably distant and chaste. I had one obvious difficulty in my own circumstances: my patron was a master, not a mistress. Yet precisely because of this, the convention imposed its own interesting construction. It reminded me of the convention in a theatre, whereby a man would play a woman’s role. By the same processes, perhaps, it stimulated rather than repressed the imagination.

      If a man, rather than a woman, were to be the object of those high-flown praises, a more subtle tone was required – of fervent infatuation which was, at the same time, ironic. And since my master was himself both intelligent and someone who enjoyed praise, I began with the advantage of a most discerning subject for my poetry.

      Until then I had mainly drafted certain thoughts in the form of individual lines and brief passages of description or argument. But now, reaching my rooms, I attempted to write a sonnet which would perhaps function as a keystone to my efforts. With a clean page before me, I began by praising my master’s beauty as though he were my beloved mistress, at the same time asserting that my love was not physical, but spiritual.

       A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted,

       Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

       A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

       With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

       An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

       Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

       A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,

       Which steals men’s eyes, and women’s souls amazeth.

       And for a woman wert thou first created;

       Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

       And by addition thee of me defeated,

       By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

       But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,

       Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

      If it were a sonnet СКАЧАТЬ