The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems, Plays, Essays, Lectures, Autobiography & Personal Letters (Illustrated). Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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СКАЧАТЬ The Hermit crossed his brow.

       “Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say —

       What manner of man art thou?”

       Oh shrieve me, holy man

      Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched

       With a woeful agony,

       Which forced me to begin my tale;

       And then it left me free.

      Since then, at an uncertain hour,

       That agony returns;

       And till my ghastly tale is told,

       This heart within me burns.

       Strange power of speech

      I pass, like night, from land to land;

       I have strange power of speech;

       That moment that his face I see,

       I know the man that must hear me:

       To him my tale I teach.

       I know the man that must hear me

      What loud uproar bursts from that door!

       The wedding-guests are there:

       But in the garden-bower the bride

       And bride-maids singing are:

       And hark the little vesper bell,

       Which biddeth me to prayer!

       The Wedding Guests

      O Wedding–Guest! this soul hath been

       Alone on a wide wide sea:

       So lonely ’twas, that God himself

       Scarce seemed there to be.

       So Lonely

      O sweeter than the marriage-feast,

       ’Tis sweeter far to me,

       To walk together to the kirk

       With a goodly company! —

      To walk together to the kirk,

       And all together pray,

       While each to his great Father bends,

       Old men, and babes, and loving friends,

       And youths and maidens gay!

      Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

       To thee, thou Wedding–Guest!

       He prayeth well, who loveth well

       Both man and bird and beast.

      He prayeth best, who loveth best

       All things both great and small;

       For the dear God who loveth us

       He made and loveth all.

      The Mariner, whose eye is bright,

       Whose beard with age is hoar,

       Is gone: and now the Wedding–Guest

       Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

       The mariner is gone

      He went like one that hath been stunned,

       And is of sense forlorn:

       A sadder and a wiser man,

       He rose the morrow morn.

      Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment

       Table of Contents

      In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

      A stately pleasure-dome decree:

      Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

      Through caverns measureless to man

       Down to a sunless sea. 5

      So twice five miles of fertile ground

      With walls and towers were girdled round:

      And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

      Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

      And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10

      Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

      But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

      Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

      A savage place! as holy and enchanted

      As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15

      By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

      And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

      As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

      A mighty fountain momently was forced:

      Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20

      Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

      Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

      And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

      It flung up momently the sacred river.

      Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25

      Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

      Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

      And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

      And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

      Ancestral СКАЧАТЬ