Английская поэзия XIV–XX веков в современных русских переводах

Lord, Thou hast crushed Thy tender ones, o’er-thrown

Thy strong, Thy fair; Thy man thou hast unmanned,

Thy elaborate works unwrought, Thy deeds undone,

Thy lovely sentient human plan unplanned;

Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own

Immediate, unintelligible hand.

Lord, Thou hast hastened to retrieve, to heal,

To feed, to bind, to clothe, to quench the brand,

To prop the ruin, to bless, and to anneal;

Hast sped Thy ships by sea, Thy trains by land,

Shed pity and tears: — our shattered fingers feel

Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

I come from nothing; but from where

Come the undying thoughts I bear?

Down, through long links of death and birth,

From the past poets of the earth.

My immortality is there.

I am like the blossom of an hour.

But long, long vanished sun and shower

Awoke my breath i’ the young world’s air.

I track the past back everywhere

Through seed and flower and seed and flower.

Or I am like a stream that flows

Full of the cold springs that arose

In morning lands, in distant hills;

And down the plain my channel fills

With melting of forgotten snows.

Voices I have not heard possessed

My own fresh songs; my thoughts are blessed

With relics of the far unknown;

And mixed with memories not my own

The sweet streams throng into my breast.

Before this life began to be,

The happy songs that wake in me

Woke long ago, and far apart

Heavily on this little heart

Presses this immortality.

The Lady Poverty was fair:

But she has lost her looks of late,

With change of times and change of air.

Ah slattern! she neglects her hair,

Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state

As once when her pure feet were bare.

Or — almost worse, if worse can be —

She scolds in parlours, dusts and trims,

Watches and counts. Oh, is this she

Whom Francis met, whose step was free,

Who with Obedience carolled hymns,

In Umbria walked with Chastity?

Where is her ladyhood? Not here,

Not among modern kinds of men;

But in the stony fields, where clear

Through the thin trees the skies appear,

In delicate spare soil and fen,

And slender landscape and austere.