The Complete Poetical Works of George MacDonald. George MacDonald

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Of home-come sailors, into sleeping streets!

       Blow gently, wind! blow slowly, gentle wind!

      Weep not yet, maiden; 'tis not yet thy hour.

       Why shouldst thou weep before thy time is come?

       Go to thy work; break into song sometimes—

       Song dying slow-forgotten, in the lapse

       Of dreamy thought, ere natural pause ensue,

       Or sudden dropt what time the eager heart

       Hurries the ready eye to north and east.

       Sing, maiden, while thou canst, ere yet the truth,

       Slow darkening, choke the heart-caged singing bird!

      The weeks went by. Oft leaving household work,

       With bare arms and uncovered head she clomb

       The landward slope of the prophetic hill;

       From whose green head, as from the verge of time,

       Far out on the eternity of blue,

       Shading her hope-rapt eyes, seer-like she gazed,

       If from the Hades of the nether world,

       Slow climbing up the round side of the earth,

       Haply her prayers were drawing his tardy sails

       Over the threshold of the far sky-sea—

       Drawing her sailor home to celebrate,

       With holy rites of family and church,

       The apotheosis of maidenhood.

      Months passed; he came not; and a shadowy fear,

       Long haunting the horizon of her soul,

       In deeper gloom and sharper form drew nigh;

       And growing in bulk, possessed her atmosphere,

       And lost all shape, because it filled all space,

       And reached beyond the bounds of consciousness—

       In sudden incarnations darting swift

       From out its infinite a gulfy stare

       Of terror blank, of hideous emptiness,

       Of widowhood ere ever wedding-day.

      On granite ridge, and chalky cliff, and pier,

       Far built into the waves along our shores,

       Maidens have stood since ever ships went forth;

       The same pain at the heart; the same slow mist

       Clouding the eye; the same fixed longing look,

       As if the soul had gone, and left the door

       Wide open—gone to lean, hearken, and peer

       Over the awful edge where voidness sinks

       Sheer to oblivion—that horizon-line

       Over whose edge he vanished—came no more.

       O God, why are our souls, waste, helpless seas,

       Tortured with such immitigable storm?

       What is this love, that now on angel wing

       Sweeps us amid the stars in passionate calm;

       And now with demon arms fast cincturing,

       Drops us, through all gyrations of keen pain,

       Down the black vortex, till the giddy whirl

       Gives fainting respite to the ghastly brain?

       O happy they for whom the Possible

       Opens its gates of madness, and becomes

       The Real around them!—such to whom henceforth

       There is but one to-morrow, the next morn,

       Their wedding-day, ever one step removed,

       The husband's foot ever upon the verge

       Of the day's threshold, in a lasting dream!

       Such madness may be but a formless faith—

       A chaos which the breath of God will blow

       Into an ordered world of seed and fruit.

       Shall not the Possible become the Real?

       God sleeps not when he makes his daughters dream.

       Shall not the morrow dawn at last which leads

       The maiden-ghost, confused and half awake,

       Into the land whose shadows are our dreams?—

       Thus questioning we stand upon the shore,

       And gaze across into the Unrevealed.

      Upon its visible symbol gazed the girl,

       Till earth behind her ceased, and sea was all,

       Possessing eyes and brain and shrinking soul—

       A universal mouth to swallow up,

       And close eternally in one blue smile!

       A still monotony of pauseless greed,

       Its only voice an endless, dreary song

       Of wailing, and of craving from the world!

      A low dull dirge that ever rose and died,

       Recurring without pause or change or close,

       Like one verse chaunted ever in sleepless brain,

       Still drew her to the shore. It drew her down,

       Like witch's spell, that fearful endless moan;

       Somewhere, she thought, in the green abyss below,

       His body, at the centre of the moan,

       Obeyed the motions whence the moaning grew;

       Now, now, in circle slow revolved, and now

       Swayed like a wind-swung bell, now swept along

       Hither and thither, idly to and fro,

       Heedlessly wandering through the heedless sea.

       Its fascination drew her onward still—

       On to the ridgy rocks that СКАЧАТЬ