To drive the cows outside with ringing;
Nor does his horn at midday sound
The call that brings them gathering round.
Inside her hut a girl is singing,
And by the matchwood's crackling light
She spins away the wintry night.
42
The frost already cracks and crunches;
The fields are silver where they froze . ..
(And you, good reader, with your hunches,
Expect the rhyme, so take itRose!)
No fine parquet could hope to muster
The ice-clad river's glassy lustre;
The joyous tribe of boys berates
And cuts the ice with ringing skates;
A waddling red-foot goose now scurries
To swim upon the water's breast;
He treads the ice with care to test. . .
And down he goes! The first snow flurries
Come flitting, flicking, swirling round
To fall like stars upon the ground.
43
But how is one, in this dull season,
To help the rural day go by?
Take walks? The views give little reason,
When only bareness greets the eye.
Go ride the steppe's harsh open spaces?
Your mount, if put to try his paces
On treacherous ice in blunted shoe,
Is sure to fall. . . and so will you.
So stay beneath your roof... try reading:
Here's Pradt* or, better, Walter Scott!
Or check accounts. You'd rather not?
Then rage or drink. . . . Somehow proceeding,
This night will pass (the next one too),
And grandly you'll see winter through!
44
Childe Harold-like, Onegin ponders,
Adrift in idle, slothful ways;
From bed to icy bath he wanders,
And then at home all day he stays,
Alone, and sunk in calculation,
His only form of recreation
The game of billiards, all day through,
With just two balls and blunted cue.
But as the rural dusk encroaches,
The cue's forgot, the billiards fade;
Before the hearth the table's laid.
He waits.... At last his guest approaches:
