Английская поэзия XIV–XX веков в современных русских переводах (билингва)

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death,

And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath —
When we are dust, when we are dust! —

Not dead, not undesirous yet,

Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun,

And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.

And every mote, on earth or air,

Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,

Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that’s I
Shall meet one atom that was you.

Then in some garden hushed from wind,

Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow

Upon the peace; and, past desiring,

So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,

They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,

Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,

Out of the garden, higher, higher.

But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering ecstasy of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn

And faint in that amazing glow,

Until the darkness close above;
And they will know — poor fools, they’ll know! —
One moment, what it is to love.

The Jolly Company

The stars, a jolly company,
I envied, straying late and lonely;
And cried upon their revelry:
“O white companionship! You only
In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
Friends radiant and inseparable!”

Light-heart and glad they seemed to me

And merry comrades (even so
God out of Heaven may laugh to see
The happy crowds; and never know
That in his lone obscure distress
Each walketh in a wilderness).

But I, remembering, pitied well

And loved them, who, with lonely light,
In empty infinite spaces dwell,
Disconsolate. For, all the night,
I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.

Menelaus and Helen

I