Уистан Оден - Стихи и эссе

• Название: Стихи и эссе
• Автор: Уистан Оден
• Жанр: Публицистика

УИСТЕН ХЬЮ ОДЕН (WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN; 1907–1973) — англо-американский поэт, драматург, публицист, критик. С 1939 года жил в США. Лауреат Пулицеровской и других литературных премий. Автор многих поэтических сборников, среди которых «Танец смерти» («The Dance of Death», 1933), «Гляди, незнакомец!» («Look, Stranger!», 1936), «Испания» («Spain», 1937), «Век тревоги» («The Age of Anxiety», 1947), «Щит Ахилла» («The Shield of Achilles», 1955), «Избранные стихи» («Collected Shorter Poems», 1968).

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1936

Autumn Song

     Now the leaves are falling fast,
     Nurse's flowers will not last;
     Nurses to the graves are gone,
     And the prams go rolling on.

     Whispering neighbours, left and right,
     Pluck us from the real delight;
     And the active hands must freeze
     Lonely on the separate knees.

     Dead in hundreds at the back
     Follow wooden in our track,
     Arms raised stiffly to reprove
     In false attitudes of love.

     Starving through the leafless wood
     Trolls run scolding for their food;
     And the nightingale is dumb,
     And the angel will not come.

     Cold, impossible, ahead
     Lifts the mountain's lovely head
     Whose white waterfall could bless
     Travellers in their last distress.

1936

Death's Echo

     "O who can ever gaze his fill,"
     Farmer and fisherman say,
     "On native shore and local hill,
     Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?
     Father, grandfather stood upon this land,
     And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand."
     So farmer and fisherman say
     In their fortunate hey-day:
     But Death's low answer drifts across
     Empty catch or harvest loss
     Or an unlucky May.
     The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,
     Not to be born is the best for man;
     The end of toil is a bailiff's order,
     Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.

     "O life's too short for friends who share,"
     Travellers think in their hearts,
     "The city's common bed, the air,
     The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,
     Where incidents draw every day from each
     Memorable gesture and witty speech."
     So travellers think in their hearts,
     Till malice or circumstance parts
     Them from their constant humour:
     And slyly Death's coercive rumour
     In that moment starts.
     A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus,
     Not to be born is the best for man;
     An active partner in something disgraceful,
     Change your partner, dance while you can.

     "O stretch your hands across the sea,"
     The impassioned lover cries,
     "Stretch them towards your harm and me.
     Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed,
     The stream sings at its foot, and at its head
     The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed."
     So the impassioned lover cries
     Till the storm of pleasure dies:
     From the bedpost and the rocks
     Death's enticing echo mocks,
     And his voice replies.
     The greater the love, the more false to its object,
     Not to be born is the best for man;
     After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle,
     Break the embraces, dance while you can.

     "I see the guilty world forgiven,"
     Dreamer and drunkard sing,
     "The ladders let down out of heaven,
     The laurel springing from the martyr's blood,
     The children skipping where the weeper stood,
     The lovers natural and the beasts all good."
     So dreamer and drunkard sing
     Till day their sobriety bring:
     Parrotwise with Death's reply
     From whelping fear and nesting lie,
     Woods and their echoes ring.
     The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
     Not to be born is the best for man;
     The second-best is a formal order,
     The dance's pattern; dance while you can.

     Dance, dancefor the figure is easy,
     The tune is catching and will not stop;
     Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
     Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

1936

Musée des Beaux Arts

     About suffering they were never wrong,
     The Old Masters: how well they understood
     Its human position; how it takes place
     While someone else is eating  or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
     How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
     For the miraculous birth, there always must be
     Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
     On a pond at the edge of the wood:
     They never forgot
     That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
     Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
     Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
     Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

     In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
     Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
     Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
     But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
     As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
     Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
     Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
     Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

1938

from In Time of War

        I

     So from the years the gifts were showered; each
     Ran off with his at once into his life:
     Bee took the politics that make a hive,
     Fish swam as fish, peach settled into peach.

     And were successful at the first endeavour;
     The hour of birth their only time at college,
     They were content with their precocious knowledge,
     And knew their station and were good for ever.

     Till finally there came a childish creature
     On whom the years could model any feature,
     And fake with ease a leopard or a dove;

     Who by the lightest wind was changed and shaken,
     And looked for truth and was continually mistaken,
     Ana envied his few friends and chose his love.

        VIII

     He turned his field into a meeting-place,
     And grew the tolerant ironic eye,
     And formed the mobile money-changer's face,
     And found the notion of equality.

     And strangers were as brothers to his clocks,
     And with his spires he made a human sky;
     Museums stored his learning like a box,
     And paper watched his money like a spy.

     It grew so fast his life was overgrown,
     And he forgot what once it had been made for,
     And gathered into crowds and was alone,

     And lived expensively and did without,
     And could not find the earth which he had paid for,
     Nor feel the love that he knew all about.

        XXI

     The life of man is never quite completed;
     The daring and the chatter will go on:
     But, as an artist feels his power gone,
     These walk the earth and know themselves defeated.

     Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for
     The wounded myths that once made nations good,
     Some lost a world they never understood,
     Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.

     Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety
     Receives them like a grand hotel; but where
     They may regret they must; their life, to hear

     The call of the forbidden cities, see
     The stranger watch them with a happy stare,
     And Freedom hostile in each home and tree.

        XXV

     Nothing is given: we must find our law.
     Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination;
     Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation
     The low recessive houses of the poor.

     We have no destiny assigned us:
     Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
     To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
     Of the equality of man.

     Children are really loved here, even by police:
     They speak of years before the big were lonely,
     And will be lost.

         And only
     The brass bands throbbing in the parks foretell
     Some future reign of happiness and peace.

     We learn to pity and rebel.

1938

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

(d. Jan. 1939)

        I

     He disappeared in the dead of winter:
     The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
     And snow disfigured the public statues;
     The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
     What instruments we have agree
     The day of his death was a dark cold day.

     Far from his illness
     The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
     The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
     By mourning tongues
     The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
     But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

     An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
     The provinces of his body revolted,
     The squares of his mind were empty,
     Silence invaded the suburbs,
     The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

     Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
     And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
     To find his happiness in another kind of wood
     And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
     The words of a dead man
     Are modified in the guts of the living.

     But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
     When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
     And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
     And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
     A few thousand will think of this day
     As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
     What instruments we have agree
     The day of his death was a dark cold day.

        II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
     The parish of rich women, physical decay,
     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.

        III

     Earth, receive an honoured guest:
     William Yeats is laid to rest.
     Let the Irish vessel lie
     Emptied of its poetry.

     In the nightmare of the dark
     All the dogs of Europe bark,
     And the living nations wait,
     Each sequestered in its hate;

     Intellectual disgrace
     Stares from every human face,
     And the seas of pity lie
     Locked and frozen in each eye.

     Follow, poet, follow right
     To the bottom of the night,
     With your unconstraining voice
     Still persuade us to rejoice;

     With the firming of a verse
     Make a vineyard of the curse,
     Sing of human unsuccess
     In a rapture of distress;

     In the deserts of the heart
     Let the healing fountain start,
     In the prison of his days
     Teach the free man how to praise.

1939