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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1939

Law Like Love

     Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
     Law is the one
     All gardeners obey
     To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

     Law is the wisdom of the old,
     The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
     The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
     Law is the senses of the young.

     Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
     Expounding to an unpriestly people,
     Law is the words in my priestly book,
     Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
     Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
     Speaking clearly and most severely,
     Law is as I've told you before,
     Law is as you know I suppose,
     Law is but let me explain it once more,
     Law is The Law.

     Yet law-abiding scholars write:
     Law is neither wrong nor right,
     Law is only crimes
     Punished by places and by times,
     Law is the clothes men wear
     Anytime, anywhere,
     Law is Good-morning and Good-night.

     Others say, Law is our Fate;
     Others say, Law is our State;
     Others say, others say
     Law is no more,
     Law has gone away.

     And always the loud angry crowd,
     Very angry and very loud,
     Law is We,
     And always the soft idiot softly Me.

     If we, dear, know we know no more
     Than they about the Law,
     If I no more than you
     Know what we should and should not do
     Except that all agree
     Gladly or miserably
     That the Law is
     And that all know this,
     If therefore thinking it absurd
     To identify Law with some other word,
     Unlike so many men
     I cannot say Law is again,
     No more than they can we suppress
     The universal wish to guess
     Or slip out of our own position
     Into an unconcerned condition.
     Although I can at least confine
     Your vanity and mine
     To stating tirmidly
     A timid similarity,
     We shall boast anyway:
     Like love I say.

     Like love we don't know where or why,
     Like love we can't compel or fly,
     Like love we often weep,
     Like love we seldom keep.

1939

Under Which Lyre

A REACTIONARY TRACT FOR THE TIMES (Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Harvard, 1946)

     Ares at last has quit the field,
     The bloodstains on the bushes yield
        To seeping showers,
     And in their convalescent state
     The fractured towns associate
        With summer flowers.

     Encamped upon the college plain
     Raw veterans already train
        As freshman forces;
     Instructors with sarcastic tongue
     Shepherd the battle-weary young
        Through basic courses.

     Among bewildering appliances
     For mastering the arts and sciences
        They stroll or run,
     And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
     Are shot to pieces by the shorter
        Poems of Donne.

     Professors back from secret missions
     Resume their proper eruditions,
        Though some regret it;
     They liked their dictaphones a lot,
     They met some big wheels, and do not
        Let you forget it.

     But Zeus' inscrutable decree
     Permits the will-to-disagree
        To be pandemic,
     Ordains that vaudeville shall preach
     And every commencement speech
        Be a polemic.

     Let Ares doze, that other war
     Is instantly declared once more
        'Twixt those who follow
     Precocious Hermes all the way
     And those who without qualms obey
        Pompous Apollo.

     Brutal like all Olympic games,
     Though fought with similes and Christian names
        And less dramatic,
     This dialectic strife between
     The civil gods is just as mean,
        And more fanatic.

     What high immortals do in mirth
     Is life and death on Middle Earth;
        Their a-historic
     Antipathy forever gripes
     All ages and somatic types,
        The sophomoric

     Who face the future's darkest hints
     With giggles or with prairie squints
        As stout as Cortez,
     And those who like myself turn pale
     As we approach with ragged sail
        The fattening forties.

     The sons of Hermes love to play,
     And only do their best when they
        Are told they oughtn't;
     Apollo's children never shrink
     From boring jobs but have to think
        Their work important.

     Related by antithesis,
     A compromise between us is
        Impossible;
     Respect perhaps but friendship never:
     Falstaff the fool confronts forever
        The prig Prince Hal.

     If he would leave the self alone,
     Apollo's welcome to the throne,
        Fasces and falcons;
     He loves to rule, has always done it;
     The earth would soon, did Hermes run it,
        Be like the Balkans.

     But jealous of our god of dreams,
     His common-sense in secret schemes
        To rule the heart;
     Unable to invent the lyre,
     Creates with simulated fire
        Official art.

     And when he occupies a college,
     Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
        He pays particular
     Attention to Commercial Thought,
     Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
        In his curricula.

     Athletic, extrovert and crude,
     For him, to work in solitude
        Is the offence,
     The goal a populous Nirvana:
     His shield bears this device: Mens sana
     Qui mal y pense.

     To-day his arms, we must confess,
     From Right to Left have met success,
        His banners wave
     From Yale to Princeton, and the news
     From Broadway to the Book Reviews
        Is very grave.

     His radio Homers all day long
     In over-Whitmanated song
        That does not scan,
     With adjectives laid end to end,
     Extol the doughnut and commend
        The Common Man.

     His, too, each homely lyric thing
     On sport or spousal love or spring
        Or dogs or dusters,
     Invented by some court-house bard
     For recitation by the yard
        In filibusters.

     To him ascend the prize orations
     And sets of fugal variations
        On some folk-ballad,
     While dietitians sacrifice
     A glass of prune-juice or a nice
        Marsh-mallow salad.

     Charged with his compound of sensational
     Sex plus some undenominational
        Religious matter,
     Enormous novels by co-eds
     Rain down on our defenceless heads
        Till our teeth chatter.

     In fake Hermetic uniforms
     Behind our battle-line, in swarms
        That keep alighting,
     His existentialists declare
     That they are in complete despair,
        Yet go on writing.

     No matter; He shall be defied;
     White Aphrodite is on our side:
        What though his threat
     To organize us grow more critical?
     Zeus willing, we, the unpolitical,
        Shall beat him yet.

     Lone scholars, sniping from the walls
     Of learned periodicals,
        Our facts defend,
     Our intellectual marines,
     Landing in little magazines,
        Capture a trend.

     By night our student Underground
     At cocktail parties whisper round
        From ear to ear;
     Fat figures in the public eye
     Collapse next morning, ambushed by
        Some witty sneer.

     In our morale must lie our strength:
     So, that we may behold at length
        Routed Apollo's
     Battalions melt away like fog,
     Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,
        Which runs as follows:-

     Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
     Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis
        On education,
     Thou shalt not worship projects nor
     Shalt thou or thine bow down before
        Administration.

     Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
     Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
        Nor with compliance
     Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
     With statisticians nor commit
        A social science.

     Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
     With guys in advertising firms,
        Nor speak with such
     As read the Bible for its prose,
     Nor, above all, make love to those
        Who wash too much.

     Thou shalt not live within thy means
     Nor on plain water and raw greens.
        If thou must choose
     Between the chances, choose the odd;
     Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
        And take short views.

1946

A Walk After Dark

     A cloudless night like this
     Can set the spirit soaring:
     After a tiring day
     The clockwork spectacle is
     Impressive in a slightly boring
     Eighteenth-century way.

     It soothed adolescence a lot
     To meet so shameless a stare;
     The things I did could not
     Be so shocking as they said
     If that would still be there
     After the shocked were dead.

     Now, unready to die
     But already at the stage
     When one starts to resent the young,
     I am glad those points in the sky
     May also be counted among
     The creatures of Middle-age.

     It's cosier thinking of night
     As more an Old People's Home
     Than a shed for a faultless machine,
     That the red pre-Cambrian light
     Is gone like Imperial Rome
     Or myself at seventeen.

     Yet however much we may like
     The stoic manner in which
     The classical authors wrote,
     Only the young and the rich
     Have the nerve or the figure to strike
     The lacrimae rerum note.

     For the present stalks abroad
     Like the past and its wronged again
     Whimper and are ignored,
     And the truth cannot be hid;
     Somebody chose their pain,
     What needn't have happened did.

     Occurring this very night
     By no established rule,
     Some event may already have hurled
     Its first little No at the right
     Of the laws we accept to school
     Our post-diluvian world:

     But the stars burn on overhead,
     Unconscious of final ends,
     As I walk home to bed,
     Asking what judgement waits
     My person, all my friends,
     And these United States.

1948