Искусствоед
Lawrence Durrell
from Eternal Contemporaries: Six Portraits
3. Basil the Hermit
Banished from the old roof-tree Patmos
Where the dynasts gathered honey,
Like dancing bears, with smoking rituals,
Or skimmed the fat of towns with levy-money,
Uncaring whether God or Paradise exist,
Laid up themselves estates in providence
While greed crouched in each hairy fist,
Basil, the troubled flower of scepticism,
Chose him a pelt, and a cairn of chilly stone,
Became the author of a famous schism:
A wick for oil, a knife, a broken stool
Were all, this side of hell, he dared to own.
For twenty years in Jesus went to school.
Often, looking up, he saw them there
As from some prism-stained pool:
Dark dots like birds along the battlements,
Old rooks swayed in a rotten tree.
They waved: he did not answer, although he
Felt kindly to them all, for they could do
What he could not: he did not dare to pray.
His inner prohibitions were a sea
On which he floated spellbound day by day.
World and its fevers howled outside: within
The Omen and the Fret that hemmed him in,
The sense of his complete unworthiness
Pressed each year slowly tighter like a tourniquet.
from Eternal Contemporaries: Six Portraits
3. Basil the Hermit
Banished from the old roof-tree Patmos
Where the dynasts gathered honey,
Like dancing bears, with smoking rituals,
Or skimmed the fat of towns with levy-money,
Uncaring whether God or Paradise exist,
Laid up themselves estates in providence
While greed crouched in each hairy fist,
Basil, the troubled flower of scepticism,
Chose him a pelt, and a cairn of chilly stone,
Became the author of a famous schism:
A wick for oil, a knife, a broken stool
Were all, this side of hell, he dared to own.
For twenty years in Jesus went to school.
Often, looking up, he saw them there
As from some prism-stained pool:
Dark dots like birds along the battlements,
Old rooks swayed in a rotten tree.
They waved: he did not answer, although he
Felt kindly to them all, for they could do
What he could not: he did not dare to pray.
His inner prohibitions were a sea
On which he floated spellbound day by day.
World and its fevers howled outside: within
The Omen and the Fret that hemmed him in,
The sense of his complete unworthiness
Pressed each year slowly tighter like a tourniquet.