[Lika_k]

Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems. 1924.
Part One: Life
XCII
Drowning is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, ’t is said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode

Where hope and he part company,—
For he is grasped of God.
The Maker’s cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.

@темы: d, 19, english-american, dickinson, emily

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[Lika_k]

Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems. 1924.
Part One: Life
XC
To venerate the simple days
Which lead the seasons by,
Needs but to remember
That from you or me
They may take the trifle
Termed mortality!

To invest existence with a stately air,
Needs but to remember
That the acorn there
Is the egg of forests
For the upper air!

@темы: d, 19, english-american, dickinson, emily

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[Lika_k]

Ezra Pound
Collected Shorter Poems (Faber and Faber, 1973)
Rome
From the French of Joachim du Bellay
"Troica Roma resurges" — Propertius[, Elegies IV,I, 087]

O thou newcomer who seek—st Rome in Rome
And find—st in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman;
Arches worn old and palaces made common
Rome—s name alone within these walls keeps home.

Behold how pride and ruin can befall
One who hath set the whole world —neath her laws,
All-conquering, now conquered, because
She is Time—s prey, and Time conquereth all.

Rome that art Rome—s one sole last monument,
Rome that alone hast conquered Rome the town,
Tiber alone, transient and seaward bent,

Remains of Rome. O world, thou unconstant mime!
That which stands firm in thee Time batters down,
And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift Time.

@темы: b, d, 16, p, 20, francaise, english-american, pound, ezra

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[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
Taormina
We three men sit all evening
In the rose-garden drinking and waiting
For the moon to turn our roses black,
Crawling across the sky. We mention
Our absent friend from time to time.
Some chessmen have tumbled over,
They also die who only sit and wait
For the new moon before this open gate.

What further travel can we wish on friends
To coax their absence with our memory —
One who followed the flying fish beyond the
Remote Americas, one to die in battle, one
to live in Persia and never write again.
She loved them all according to their need
Now they are small dust waiting in perfect heed,
In someone's memory for a cue.
Thus and thus we shall remember you.

The smoke of pipes rises in pure content
The roses stretch their necks, and there
She rises at last to lend
A form and fiction to our loving wish.
The legions of the silent all attend.

(from "Sicilian Carousel", 1977)

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence

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[Lika_k]

Lawrence Durrell
A Persian Lady
Some diplomatic mission - no such thing as "fate" -
Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
She was much pointed out - a Lady-in Waiting -
To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
By night in queer crocketed tent with tassels.

He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
The sea advancing and retiring at her laquered toes;
How would one say "to enflame" in her tongue,
He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
It would have been simple - three paces apart!

Disloyal time! The let the seminal instant go,
The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
Bandoned to hiss on the great syllabaries of memory.
Next day he deliberately left the musical city
To join a boring water-party on the lake.
Telling himself "Say what you like about it,
I have been spared very much in this business."

He meant, I think, that never should he now
Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,
The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
Grey temple, long slide into fat.

On the other hand neither would she build him sons
Or be a subject for verses - the famished in-bred poetry
Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
In a biography the year of birth and death.

@темы: d, 20, english-british, durrell, lawrence