Стихотворения

418. THE POEM^{*}

Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud,
with its linden tree in India ink
and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;

not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
shoulder still glimmering there;
not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme —
the tiny music that tells the time;

and not the pennies and weights on those
evening papers piled up in the rain;
not the cacodemons of carnal pain;
not the things you can say so much better in plain prose —

but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown
— when you wait for the splash of the stone
deep below, and grope for your pen,
and then comes the shiver, and then —

in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense,
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

<10 июня> 1944

419. AN EVENING OF RUSSIAN POETRY{*}

«…seems to be the best train. Miss Ethel Winter of the Department of English will meet you at the station and…»

From a letter addressed to the visiting speaker

The subject chosen for tonight's discussion
is everywhere, though often incomplete:
when their basaltic banks become too steep,
most rivers use a kind of rapid Russian,
and so do children talking in their sleep.
My little helper at the magic lantern,
insert that slide and let the colored beam
project my name or any such-like phantom
in Slavic characters upon the screen.
The other way, the other way. I thank you.

On mellow hills the Greek, as you remember,
fashioned his alphabet from cranes in flight;
his arrows crossed the sunset, then the night.
Our simple skyline and a taste for timber,
the influence of hives and conifers,
Yes, Sylvia?

             «Why do you speak of words
when all we want is knowledge nicely browned?»

Because all hangs together — shape and sound,
heather and honey, vessel and content.
Not only rainbows — every line is bent,
and skulls and seeds and all good words are round,
like Russian verse, like our colossal vowels:
those painted eggs, those glossy pitcher flowers
that swallow whole a golden bumblebee,
those shells that hold a thimble and the sea.
Next question.

                 «Is your prosody like ours?»

Well, Emmy, our pentameter may seem
to foreign ears as if it could not rouse
the limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream.
But close your eyes and listen to the line.
The melody unwinds; the middle word
is marvelously long and serpentine:
you hear one beat, but you have also heard
the shadow of another, then the third
touches the gong, and then the fourth one sighs.

It makes a very fascinating noise:
it opens slowly, like a greyish rose
in pedagogic films of long ago.

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,