قراءة كتاب King Lear's Wife; The Crier by Night; The Riding to Lithend; Midsummer-Eve; Laodice and Danaë
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King Lear's Wife; The Crier by Night; The Riding to Lithend; Midsummer-Eve; Laodice and Danaë
right; she judges me:
A sinful woman cannot steadily gaze reply
To the cool, baffling looks of virgin untried force.
She stands beside that crumbling mother in her hate,
And, though we know so well—she and I, O we know—
That she could love no mother nor partake in anguish,
Yet she is flouted when the King forsakes her dam,
She must protect her very flesh, her tenderer flesh,
Although she cannot wince; she's wild in her cold brain,
And soon I must be made to pay a cruel price
For this one gloomy joy in my uncherished life.
Envy and greed are watching me aloof
(Yes, now none of the women will walk with me),
Longing to see me ruined, but she'll do it....
It is a lonely thing to love a king....
Goldilocks, when the crown is couching in your hair
And those two mingled golds brighten each other's wonder,
You shall produce a son from flesh unused—
Virgin I chose you for that, first crops are strongest—
A tawny fox with your high-stepping action,
With your untiring power and glittering eyes,
To hold my lands together when I am done,
To keep my lands from crumbling into mouthfuls
For the short jaws of my three mewling vixens.
Hatch for me such a youngster from my seed,
And I and he shall rein my hot-breathed wenches
To let you grind the edges off their teeth.
Gormflaith, shaking her head sadly.
Life holds no more than this for me; this is my hour.
When she is dead I know you'll buy another Queen—
Giving a county for her, gaining a duchy with her—
And put me to wet nursing, leashing me with the thralls.
It will not be unbearable—I've had your love.
Master and friend, grant then this hour to me:
Never again, maybe, can we two sit
At love together, unwatched, unknown of all,
In the Queen's chamber, near the Queen's crown
And with no conscious Queen to hold it from us:
Now let me wear the Queen's true crown on me
And snatch a breathless knowledge of the feeling
Of what it would have been to sit by you
Always and closely, equal and exalted,
To be my light when life is dark again.
Lear.
Girl, by the black stone god, I did not think
You had the nature of a chambermaid,
Who pries and fumbles in her lady's clothes
With her red hands, or on her soily neck
Stealthily hangs her lady's jewels or pearls.
You shall be tiring-maid to the next queen
And try her crown on every day o' your life
In secrecy, if that is your desire:
If you would be a queen, cleanse yourself quickly
Of menial fingering and servile thought.
Gormflaith.
You need not crown me. Let me put it on
As briefly as a gleam of Winter sun.
I will not even warm it with my hair.
Lear.
You cannot have the nature of a queen
If you believe that there are things above you:
Crowns make no queens, queens are the cause of crowns.
Gormflaith, slipping from his knee.
Then I will take one. Look.
Come here, mad thing—come back!
Your shadow will wake the Queen.
Gormflaith.
Hush, hush! That angry voice
Will surely wake the Queen.
Go back; bear back the crown:
Hang up the crown again.
We are not helpless serfs
To think things are forbidden
And steal them for our joy.
Gormflaith.
Hush! Hush! It is too late;
I dare not go again.
Lear.
Put down the crown: your hands are base hands yet.
Give it to me: it issues from my hands.