Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces. Томас Харди

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СКАЧАТЬ THE MOTH-SIGNAL (On Egdon Heath)

       SEEN BY THE WAITS

       THE TWO SOLDIERS

       THE DEATH OF REGRET

       IN THE DAYS OF CRINOLINE

       THE ROMAN GRAVEMOUNDS

       THE WORKBOX

       THE SACRILEGE A BALLAD-TRAGEDY (Circa 182-)

       THE ABBEY MASON (Inventor of the “ Perpendicular ” Style of Gothic Architecture)

       THE JUBILEE OF A MAGAZINE (To the Editor)

       THE SATIN SHOES

       EXEUNT OMNES

       A POET

       POSTSCRIPT “MEN WHO MARCH AWAY” (SONG OF THE SOLDIERS)

LYRICS AND REVERIES

       Table of Contents

IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

       Table of Contents

      Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,

       Dolorous and dear,

       Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

       Stretching around,

       Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

       Yonder and near,

      Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the upland

       Foliage-crowned,

       Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat

       Stroked by the light,

       Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

       Meadow or mound.

      What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

       Under my sight,

       Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

       Lengthening to miles;

       What were the re-creations killing the daytime

       As by the night?

      O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

       Some as with smiles,

       Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

       Over the wrecked

       Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,

       Harrowed by wiles.

      Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them—

       Halo-bedecked—

       And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

       Rigid in hate,

       Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

       Dreaded, suspect.

      Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

       Further in date;

       Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

       Vibrant, beside

       Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust

       Now corporate.

      Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

       Gnawed by the tide,

       Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there

       Guilelessly glad—

       Wherefore they knew not—touched by the fringe of an ecstasy

       Scantly descried.

      Later images too did the day unfurl me,

       Shadowed and sad,

       Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

       Laid now at ease,

       Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

       Sepulture-clad.

      So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

       Over the leaze,

       Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;

      —Yea, as the rhyme

       Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness

       Captured me these.

      For, their lost revisiting manifestations

       In their own time

       Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

       Seeing behind

       Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

       Sweet, sad, sublime.

      Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

       Stare of the mind

       As they were ghosts avenging their slights СКАЧАТЬ