The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

The Complete Poetical Works - Томас Харди


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Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

      And blended pulsing life with lives long done,

       Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

      Rome

       Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter

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      (April, 1887)

      These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry

       Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;

       Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome

       Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

      And cracking frieze and rotten metope

       Express, as though they were an open tome

       Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;

       “Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”

      And yet within these ruins’ very shade

       The singing workmen shape and set and join

       Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin

       With no apparent sense that years abrade,

       Though each rent wall their feeble works invade

       Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

      Rome

       The Vatican—Sala Delle Muse

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      (1887)

      I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day,

       And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,

       And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,

       Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

      She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,

       But each and the whole—an essence of all the Nine;

       With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,

       A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

      “Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she.

       “Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy!

       I worship each and each; in the morning one,

       And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

      “To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth

       Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?”

       —“Be not perturbed,” said she. “Though apart in fame,

       As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

      —“But my loves go further—to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,

       The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim—

       Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!”

       —“Nay, wight, thou sway’st not. These are but phases of one;

      “And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,

       One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be—

       Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not, nor thyself becall,

       Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!”

      Rome

       At the Pyramid of Cestius

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      Near The Graves Of Shelley And Keats

       (1887)

      Who, then, was Cestius,

       And what is he to me?—

       Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous

       One thought alone brings he.

      I can recall no word

       Of anything he did;

       For me he is a man who died and was interred

       To leave a pyramid

      Whose purpose was exprest

       Not with its first design,

       Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest

       Two countrymen of mine.

      Cestius in life, maybe,

       Slew, breathed out threatening;

       I know not. This I know: in death all silently

       He does a kindlier thing,

      In beckoning pilgrim feet

       With marble finger high

       To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,

       Those matchless singers lie . . .

      —Say, then, he lived and died

       That stones which bear his name

       Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;

       It is an ample fame.

      Lausanne

       In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11–12 P.M.

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      June27, 1897

      (The 110th anniversary of the completion of theDecline and Fallat the same hour and place)

      A spirit seems to pass,

       Formal in pose, but grave and grand withal:

       He contemplates a volume stout and tall,

       And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

      Anon the book is closed,

       With “It is finished!” And at the alley’s end

       He turns, and soon on me his glances bend;

       And, as from earth, comes speech—small, muted, yet composed.

      “How fares the Truth now?—Ill?

       —Do pens but slily further her advance?

       May one not speed her but in phrase askance?

       Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

      “Still rule those minds on earth

       At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:

       ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?”

      Zermatt

       To the Matterhorn

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      (June-July,


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