The Complete Works. William Butler Yeats

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СКАЧАТЬ raise their heads and wander singing,

      Must murmur at last “unjust, unjust”;

      And “my speed is a weariness,” falters the mouse;

      And the kingfisher turns to a ball of dust,

      And the roof falls in of his tunnelled house.

      But the love-dew dims our eyes till the day

      When God shall come from the sea with a sigh

      And bid the stars drop down from the sky,

      And the moon like a pale rose wither away.’

BOOK II

       Table of Contents

      [194]

       [195]

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

       Table of Contents

      Now, man of croziers, shadows called our names

      And then away, away, like whirling flames;

      And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound,

      The youth and lady and the deer and hound;

      ‘Gaze no more on the phantoms,’ Niamh said,

      And kissed my eyes, and, swaying her bright head

      And her bright body, sang of faery and man

      Before God was or my old line began;

      Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; faeries of old

      Who wedded men with rings of Druid gold;

      And how those lovers never turn their eyes

      Upon the life that fades and flickers and dies,

      But love and kiss on dim shores far away

      Rolled round with music of the sighing spray:

      But sang no more, as when, like a brown bee

      That has drunk full, she crossed the misty sea

      With me in her white arms a hundred years

      Before this day; for now the fall of tears

      Troubled her song.

      I do not know if days

      Or hours passed by, yet hold the morning rays

      Shone many times among the glimmering flowers

      Wove in her flower-like hair, before dark towers

      Rose in the darkness, and the white surf gleamed

      About them; and the horse of faery screamed

      And shivered, knowing the Isle of many Fears,

      Nor ceased until white Niamh stroked his ears

      And named him by sweet names.

      A foaming tide

      Whitened afar with surge, fan-formed and wide,

      Burst from a great door marred by many a blow

      From mace and sword and pole-axe, long ago

      When gods and giants warred. We rode between

      The seaweed-covered pillars, and the green

      And surging phosphorus alone gave light

      On our dark pathway, till a countless flight

      Of moonlit steps glimmered; and left and right

      Dark statues glimmered over the pale tide

      Upon dark thrones. Between the lids of one

      The imaged meteors had flashed and run

      And had disported in the stilly jet,

      And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set,

      Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other

      Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,

      The stream churned, churned, and churned—his lips apart,

      As though he told his never slumbering heart

      Of every foamdrop on its misty way:

      Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay

      Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stairs

      And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were

      Hung from the morning star; when these mild words

      Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds:

      ‘My brothers spring out of their beds at morn,

      A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn

      They chase the noon-tide deer;

      And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air

      Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare

      A larch-wood hunting spear.

      ‘O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me;

      Flutter along the froth lips of the sea,

      And shores the froth lips wet:

      And stay a little while, and bid them weep:

      Ah, touch their blue veined eyelids if they sleep,

      And shake their coverlet.

      ‘When you have told how I weep endlessly,

      Flutter along the froth lips of the sea

      And home to me again,

      And in the shadow of my hair lie hid,

      And tell me how you came to one unbid,

      The saddest of all men.’

      A maiden with soft eyes like funeral СКАЧАТЬ