You are here

قراءة كتاب Eidola

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
Eidola

Eidola

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
المؤلف:
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 3

class="i0">Suffering even for love’s sake.


RELIEVED

For S. J. Kimm

We are weary and silent,
There is only the rhythm of marching feet;
Tho’ we move tranced, we keep it
As clock-work toys.
But each man is alone in this multitude;
We know not the world in which we move,
Seeing not the dawn, earth pale and shadowy,
Level lands of tenuous grays and greens;
For our eye-balls have been seared with fire.
Only we have our secret thoughts,
Our sense floats out from us, delicately apprehensive,
To the very fringes of our being,
Where light drowns.

REACTION

What make you here, Aphrodite,
Lady of the Golden Cymbals,
Would you dance to awaken earth again
As of old on Ida?
Here are no threshing-floors....
Men call you delicate, a lover of softness:
Making thine images of ivory, stained with sanguine;
Strewing frail petals of roses before you;
Bringing you soft stuffs of sea-dyes,
Vermilion and saffron sandals,
Floating wimples of filmy webs, that veil you,
As clear water the glittering limbs
Of a nymph beloved of Pan.
But you come among us,
With sleepy eyelids, and a sleep-soft smile,
Ere we have scraped our boots of the mud
That is half human....
You come, tho’ we are killing the lice in our shirts,
To fill our eyes with the wine of your vision,
Tho’ we are weary, and our hearts
Emptied of the old jests.
Satia te sanguine
You come among men; laughing
At the ramp of the strange beasts
Roaring our songs in estaminets,
With our hands hungry for life again.
You are come curious of our crude intoxications,
The savage pleasures and the gross lusts,
Being weary of the veiled lights, the whispers,
The languid colours, and rare spiced meats
That of old delighted you
In Paphos.
You would couch with us in the golden straw
Of these great Gothic barns,
With curious curved beams arching, as in shadowy aisles;
While through the broken mud-wall
Light rays,
Like the golden dust
On Danae poured.
And we turn from the harshness of swords,
Hungering for you....
And know not that your breasts,
Carven delicately of ivory and gold,
The lips, red and subtile,
Are born of the bitter sea-foam and bright blood.

THE OLD CALVARY

To the Rev. D. L. Prosser

It is propped in a corner of the yard,
Where vines wreathe it
With leaves and delicate tendrils;
A mutilated trunk,
Worn, and gray with weather stains;
Lichens cling to its flesh as a leprosy.
But for a moment I stood in adoration,
Reverent, as the sun-rays
Struck between the glistening leaves;
Lighting the frail, lean form,
The shrunken flanks,
That knew more suffering than held
The agonies of Laocoon.
For the memory of many prayers clung to it,
Tenderly, and glistening,
Even as the delicate vine
To the sacred flesh.

THE GUNS

Menace, hidden, but pulsing in the air of night:
Then a throbbing thunder, split and seared
With the scarlet flashes of innumerable shells,
And against it, suddenly, a shell, closer;
A purr that changes to a whine
Like a beast of prey that has missed its kill,
And again, closer.
But even in the thunder of the guns
There is a silence: and the soul groweth still.
Yea, it is cloaked in stillness:
And it is not fear.
But the torn and screaming air
Trembles under the onset of warring angels
With terrible and beautiful faces;
And the soul is stilled, knowing these awful shapes,
That burden the night with oppression,
To be but the creatures of its own lusts.

THE SIGN

We are here in a wood of little beeches:
And the leaves are like black lace
Against a sky of nacre.
One bough of clear promise
Across the moon.
It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me.
He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh,
Stilling it in an eternal peace.
Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands

Pages