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Всяк, даже зверь лесной.
С галер домой принес он
Морей озноб и страх,
И речи были солью,
Блеск моря был в глазах.
Джон Нокс был предназначен
Вступить с короной в спор;
Над Скотией все веет
Его дух до сих пор.
Перевод В. Вотрина
Свидание
Тиха, тиха, она пришла
И тихо так легла;
Я холодок у губ узнал
И то, как грудь кругла.
Ни слова. От ребра ребра
Не отнимали прочь.
И сердца совпадал удар
Ее с моим — всю ночь.
Она скользнула от меня
В тот недреманный миг,
Когда во тьме уже созрел
Звенеть петуший крик.
Тиха, тиха, она пришла…
Уход ее был тих,
А с ней — всех летних дней моих,
Как не бывало их.
Перевод Н. Скандиаки
Michael Roberts (1902–1948)
Rockall
Comforting is sleep, but the comfort falls:
The waves break on the bare rock; the traveler remembers
Shipwreck, the struggle with the waters, the wild climb,
Cries of the wind; and then nothing.
Rockall, two hundred miles west of Bembecula,
Bare rock, eighty-three feet wide, seventy feet high,
First seen captain Hall, 1810, reported inaccessible —
The last spur on the Great Atlantic Shelf.
How shall the mind think beyond the last abandoned islands?
The gulls cry, as thy cry in the isles despair,
The waves break, as they break on Tiree or Foula;
Man is alone, and death is certain.
Was is better to have died in shipwreck?
Here, naked under the bare sky,
The traveler wakes; and sanity is the same as madness
Under the grey sky pressed down to the sea’s rim.
The Castle
Words fall, words fail, like rocks, like falling stones;
Out of the towered clouds and the dark air,
Words fail, and a tree of blackness falls:
There is nothing at all to surrender or defend.
It was a grim castle, built in the bad years,
Built by an old man after years of failure,
Stuccoed with long complacency, and now
No more than an empty wineskin or a crushed fruit.
From the dark earth, the tree broke out, and men
Died with a frantic zeal, and spitting death:
Who knows what it was they died for?
Their bones are a dust, and their names forgotten.
Suburbs creep up the hill, and the trams are ru
Children find ghostly playmates in the ruins;
The sun glares on the emptiness, and vanished walls
Burn with a bitter death and unfulfilled perfection.
Stamp out the memory of old wars and lost causes:
Build a grave citadel of peace, or a tower of death:
The castle stands, inhuman, incorruptible,
Like a film before the eyes, or a mad vision.
The Images Of Death
The hawk, the furred eagle, the smooth panther—
Images of desire and power, images of death,
These we adore and fear, these we need,
Move in the solitude of night or the tall sky,
Move with a strict grace to the one fulfilment:
The Greenland falcon, the beautiful one,
Lives on carrion and dives inevitably to the prey.
To be human is more difficult:
To be human is to know oneself, to hold the broken mirror,
To become aware of justice, truth, mercy,
To choose the difficult road, to aim
Crookedly, for the direct aim is failure,
To abandon the way of the hawk and the grey falcon.
These fall, and fall stupidly:
To be human is to fall, but not stupidly;
To suffer, but not for a simple end;
To choose, and know the penalty of choice;
To read the intensity of human eyes and features;
To know the intricacy of life and the value of death;
To remember the furred eagle and the smooch panther,
The images of death, and death’s simplicity.
The Caves
This is the cave of which I spoke,
These are the blackened stones, and these
Our footprints, seven lives ago.
Darkness was in the cave like shifting smoke,