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

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СКАЧАТЬ Body-borne eyes,

       Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

       As living kind.

      Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

       In their surmise,

       “Ah—whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought

       Round him that looms

       Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

       Save a few tombs?”

CHANNEL FIRING

       Table of Contents

      That night your great guns, unawares,

       Shook all our coffins as we lay,

       And broke the chancel window-squares,

       We thought it was the Judgment-day

      And sat upright. While drearisome

       Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

       The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

       The worms drew back into the mounds,

      The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;

       It’s gunnery practice out at sea

       Just as before you went below;

       The world is as it used to be:

      “All nations striving strong to make

       Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

       They do no more for Christés sake

       Than you who are helpless in such matters.

      “That this is not the judgment-hour

       For some of them’s a blessed thing,

       For if it were they’d have to scour

       Hell’s floor for so much threatening …

      “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

       I blow the trumpet (if indeed

       I ever do; for you are men,

       And rest eternal sorely need).”

      So down we lay again. “I wonder,

       Will the world ever saner be,”

       Said one, “than when He sent us under

       In our indifferent century!”

      And many a skeleton shook his head.

       “Instead of preaching forty year,”

       My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

       “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

      Again the guns disturbed the hour,

       Roaring their readiness to avenge,

       As far inland as Stourton Tower,

       And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

      April 1914.

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

       Table of Contents

      (Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

      I

      In a solitude of the sea

       Deep from human vanity,

       And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

      II

      Steel chambers, late the pyres

       Of her salamandrine fires,

       Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

      III

      Over the mirrors meant

       To glass the opulent

       The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

      IV

      Jewels in joy designed

       To ravish the sensuous mind

       Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

      V

      Dim moon-eyed fishes near

       Gaze at the gilded gear

       And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” …

      VI

      Well: while was fashioning

       This creature of cleaving wing,

       The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

      VII

      Prepared a sinister mate

       For her—so gaily great—

       A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

      VIII

      And as the smart ship grew

       In stature, grace, and hue,

       In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

      IX

      Alien they seemed to be:

       No mortal eye could see

       The intimate welding of their later history,

      X

      Or sign that they were bent

       By paths coincident

       On being anon twin halves of one august event,

      XI

      Till the Spinner of the Years

       Said “Now!” And each one hears,

       And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

THE GHOST OF СКАЧАТЬ