Стихи и эссе

1946

A Walk After Dark

     A cloudless night like this
     Can set the spirit soaring:
     After a tiring day
     The clockwork spectacle is
     Impressive in a slightly boring
     Eighteenth-century way.

     It soothed adolescence a lot

     To meet so shameless a stare;
     The things I did could not
     Be so shocking as they said
     If that would still be there
     After the shocked were dead.

     Now, unready to die

     But already at the stage
     When one starts to resent the young,
     I am glad those points in the sky
     May also be counted among
     The creatures of Middle-age.

     It's cosier thinking of night

     As more an Old People's Home
     Than a shed for a faultless machine,
     That the red pre-Cambrian light
     Is gone like Imperial Rome
     Or myself at seventeen.

     Yet however much we may like

     The stoic manner in which
     The classical authors wrote,
     Only the young and the rich
     Have the nerve or the figure to strike
     The lacrimae rerum note.

     For the present stalks abroad

     Like the past and its wronged again
     Whimper and are ignored,
     And the truth cannot be hid;
     Somebody chose their pain,
     What needn't have happened did.

     Occurring this very night

     By no established rule,
     Some event may already have hurled
     Its first little No at the right
     Of the laws we accept to school
     Our post-diluvian world:

     But the stars burn on overhead,

     Unconscious of final ends,
     As I walk home to bed,
     Asking what judgement waits
     My person, all my friends,
     And these United States.

1948

The More Loving One

     Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
     That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
     But on earth indifference is the least
     We have to dread from man or beast.

     How should we like it were stars to burn

     With a passion for us we could not return?
     If equal affection cannot be,
     Let the more loving one be me.

     Admirer as I think I am

     Of stars that do not give a damn,
     I cannot, now I see them, say
     I missed one terribly all day.

     Were all stars to disappear or die,

     I should learn to look at an empty sky
     And feel its total dark sublime,
     Though this might take me a little time.

1957

The Shield of Achilles