Оден Уистан Хью
«Стихи»

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

September 1968

АВГУСТ 1968

Людоед творит, похоже,

То, что Человек не может,

Одного не одолеть

Связной речью овладеть,

По истерзанной долине,

По слезам и мертвечине

Он, ступая руки в боки,

Льет беcсмыслицы потоки.

Сентябрь 1968

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS

(d. January 1939)

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted?

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

O all the instruments 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 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.

O all the instruments