Волшебница Шалотт и другие стихотворения

Old poets foster’d under friendlier skies,
Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes;
And you, old popular Horace, you the wise
Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay,
And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,
Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;

If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere
That once had roll’d you round and round the Sun,
You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,
You should be jubilant that you flourish’d here
Before the Love of Letters, overdone,
Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

СОНЕТ (Певцы иных, несуетных веков)

Певцы иных, несуетных веков:
Старик Вергилий, что с утра в тенечке,
Придумав три или четыре строчки,
Их до заката править был готов;
И ты, Гораций Флакк, что для стихов
Девятилетней требовал отсрочки,
И ты, Катулл, что в крохотном комочке
Оплакал участь всех земных певцов, —

О, если глядя вспять на дольний прах,
Вы томики своих произведений
Еще узрите в бережных руках,
Ликуйте, о возвышенные тени! —
Пока искусства натиск и размах
Вас не завалит грудой дребедени.

Г. Кружков

TIRESIAS

I wish I were as in the years of old,
While yet the blessed daylight made itself
Ruddy thro’ both the roofs of sight, and woke
These eyes, now dull, but then so keen to seek
The meanings ambush’d under all they saw,
The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice,
What omens may foreshadow fate to man
And woman, and the secret of the Gods.

My son, the Gods, despite of human prayer,
Are slower to forgive than human kings.
The great God, Ares, burns in anger still
Against the guiltless heirs of him from Tyre,
Our Cadmus, out of whom thou art, who found
Beside the springs of Dirce, smote, and still’d
Thro’ all its folds the multitudinous beast,
The dragon, which our trembling fathers call’d
The God’s own son.

A tale, that told to me,
When but thine age, by age as winter-white
As mine is now, amazed, but made me yearn
For larger glimpses of that more than man
Which rolls the heavens, and lifts, and lays the deep,
Yet loves and hates with mortal hates and loves,
And moves unseen among the ways of men.
Then, in my wanderings all the lands that lie
Subjected to the Heliconian ridge
Have heard this footstep fall, altho’ my wont
Was more to scale the highest of the heights
With some strange hope to see the nearer God.

One naked peak — the sister of the sun
Would climb from out the dark, and linger there
To silver all the valleys with her shafts —
There once, but long ago, five-fold thy term
Of years, I lay; the winds were dead for heat;
The noonday crag made the hand bum; and sick
For shadow - not one bush was near — I rose
Following a torrent till its myriad falls
Found silence in the hollows underneath.
There in a secret olive-glade I saw
Pallas Athene climbing from the bath
In anger; yet one glittering foot disturb’d