Волшебница Шалотт и другие стихотворения - Теннисон Альфред (2007)

Ruddy thro’ both the roofs of sight, and woke

These eyes, now dull, but then so keen to seek

The meanings ambush’d under all they saw,

The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice,

What omens may foreshadow fate to man

And woman, and the secret of the Gods.

My son, the Gods, despite of human prayer,

Are slower to forgive than human kings.

The great God, Ares, burns in anger still

Against the guiltless heirs of him from Tyre,

Our Cadmus, out of whom thou art, who found

Beside the springs of Dirce, smote, and still’d

Thro’ all its folds the multitudinous beast,

The dragon, which our trembling fathers call’d

The God’s own son.

A tale, that told to me,

When but thine age, by age as winter-white

As mine is now, amazed, but made me yearn

For larger glimpses of that more than man

Which rolls the heavens, and lifts, and lays the deep,

Yet loves and hates with mortal hates and loves,

And moves unseen among the ways of men.

Then, in my wanderings all the lands that lie

Subjected to the Heliconian ridge

Have heard this footstep fall, altho’ my wont

Was more to scale the highest of the heights

With some strange hope to see the nearer God.

One naked peak — the sister of the sun

Would climb from out the dark, and linger there

To silver all the valleys with her shafts —

There once, but long ago, five-fold thy term

Of years, I lay; the winds were dead for heat;

The noonday crag made the hand bum; and sick

For shadow - not one bush was near — I rose

Following a torrent till its myriad falls

Found silence in the hollows underneath.

There in a secret olive-glade I saw

Pallas Athene climbing from the bath

In anger; yet one glittering foot disturb’d

The lucid well; one snowy knee was prest

Against the margin flowers; a dreadful light

Came from her golden hair, her golden helm

And all her golden armour on the grass,

And from her virgin breast, and virgin eyes

Remaining fixt on mine, till mine grew dark

For ever, and I heard a voice that said

‘Henceforth be blind, for thou hast seen too much,

And speak the truth that no man may believe.’

Son, in the hidden world of sight, that lives

Behind this darkness, I behold her still,

Beyond all work of those who carve the stone,

Beyond all dreams of Godlike womanhood,

Ineffable beauty, out of whom, at a glance,

And as it were, perforce, upon me flash’d

The power of prophesying - but to me

No power - so chain’d and coupled with the curse

Of blindness and their unbelief, who heard

And heard not, when I spake of famine, plague,

Shrine-shattering earthquake, fire, flood, thunderbolt,

And angers of the Gods for evil done

And expiation lack’d — no power on Fate,

Theirs, or mine own! for when the crowd would roar

For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom,

To cast wise words among the multitude

Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours

Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain

Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke

Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb

The madness of our cities and their kings.

Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hear

My warning that the tyranny of one

Was prelude to the tyranny of all?

My counsel that the tyranny of all

Led backward to the tyranny of one?

This power hath work’d no good to aught that lives,

And these blind hands were useless in their wars.

О therefore that the unfulfill’d desire,

The grief for ever born from griefs to be,