Уистан Оден - Стихи и эссе

     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.

     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.

     She looked over his shoulder
     For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
     And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
     His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
     And a sky like lead.

     A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
     No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
     Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
     Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
     An unintelligible multitude,
     A million eyes, a million boots in line,
     Without expression, waiting for a sign.

     Out of the air a voice without a face
     Proved by statistics that some cause was just
     In tones as dry and level as the place:
     No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
     Column by column in a cloud of dust
     They marched away enduring a belief
     Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
     For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
     Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
     Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
     Quite another scene.

     Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
     Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
     And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
     A crowd of ordinary decent folk
     Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
     As three pale figures were led forth and bound
     To three posts driven upright in the ground.

     The mass and majesty of this world, all
     That carries weight and always weighs, the same
     Lay in the hands of others; they were small
     And could not hope for help and no help came:
     What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
     Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
     And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
     For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
     Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
     But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
     But a weed-choked field.

     A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
     Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
     Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
     That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
     Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
     Of any world where promises were kept,
     Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
     Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
     Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
     To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
     Who would not live long.

     He told us we were free to choose
     But, children as we were, we thought-
     "Paternal Love will only use
     Force in the last resort

     On those too bumptious to repent."
     Accustomed to religious dread,
     It never crossed our minds He meant
     Exactly what He said.

     Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
     But it seems idle to discuss
     If anger or compassion leaves
     The bigger bangs to us.

     What reverence is rightly paid
     To a Divinity so odd
     He lets the Adam whom He made
     Perform the Acts of God?

     It might be jolly if we felt
     Awe at this Universal Man
     (When kings were local, people knelt);
     Some try to, but who can?

     The self-observed observing Mind
     We meet when we observe at all
     Is not alariming or unkind
     But utterly banal.

     Though instruments at Its command
     Make wish and counterwish come true,
     It clearly cannot understand
     What It can clearly do.

     Since the analogies are rot
     Our senses based belief upon,
     We have no means of learning what
     Is really going on,

     And must put up with having learned
     All proofs or disproofs that we tender
     Of His existence are returned
     Unopened to the sender.

     Now, did He really break the seal
     And rise again? We dare not say;
     But conscious unbelievers feel
     Quite sure of Judgement Day.

     Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
     As dead as we shall ever be,
     Speaks of some total gain or loss,
     And you and I are free

     To guess from the insulted face
     Just what Appearances He saves
     By suffering in a public place
     A death reserved for slaves.

     Nobody I know would like to be buried
     with a silver cocktail-shaker,
     a transistor radio and a strangled
     daily help, or keep his word because

     of a great-great-grandmother who got laid
     by a sacred beast. Only a press lord
     could have built San Simeon: no unearned income
     can buy us back the gait and gestures

     to manage a baroque staircase, or the art
     of believing footmen don't hear
     human speech. (In adulterine castles
     our half-strong might hang their jackets

     while mending their lethal bicycle-chains:
     luckily, there are not enough
     crags to go round.) Still, Hetty Pegler's Tump
     is worth a visit, so is Schönbrunn,

     to look at someone's idea of the body
     that should have been his, as the flesh
     Mum formulated shouldn't: that whatever
     he does or feels in the mood for,

     stock-taking, horse-play, worship, making love,
     he stays the same shape, disgraces
     a Royal I. To be over-admired is not
     good enough: although a fine figure

     is rare in either sex, others like it
     have existed before. One may
     be a Proustian snob or a sound Jacksonian
     democrat, but which of us wants

     to be touched inadvertently, even
     by his beloved? We know all about graphs
     and Darwin, enormous rooms no longer
     superhumanise, but earnest

     city-planners are mistaken: a pen
     for a rational animal
     is no fitting habitat for Adam's
     sovereign clone. I, a transplant

     from overseas, at last am dominant
     over three acres and a blooming
     conurbation of country lives, few of whom
     I shall ever meet, and with fewer

     converse. Linnaeus recoiled from the Amphibia
     as a naked gruesome rabble,
     Arachnids give me the shudders, but fools
     who deface their emblem of guilt

     are germane to Hitler: the race of spiders
     shall be allowed their webs. I should like
     to be to my water-brethren as a spell
     of fine weather: Many are stupid,

     and some, maybe, are heartless, but who is not
     vulnerable, easy to scare,
     and jealous of his privacy? (I am glad
     the blackbird, for instance, cannot

     tell if I'm talking English, German or
     just typewriting: that what he utters
     I may enjoy as an alien rigmarole.) I ought
     to outlast the limber dragonflies

     as the muscle-bound firs are certainly
     going to outlast me: I shall not end
     down any oesophagus, though I may succumb
     to a filter-passing predator,

     shall, anyhow, stop eating, surrender my smidge
     of nitrogen to the World Fund
     with a drawn-out Oh (unless at the nod
     of some jittery commander

     I be translated in a nano-second
     to a c.c. of poisonous nothing
     in a giga-death). Should conventional
     blunderbuss war and its routiers

     invest my bailiwick, I shall of course
     assume the submissive posture:
     but men are not wolves and it probably
     won't help. Territory, status,

     and love, sing all the birds, are what matter:
     what I dared not hope or fight for
     is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft
     where I needn't, ever, be at home to

     those I am not at home with, not a cradle,
     a magic Eden without clocks,
     and not a windowless grave, but a place
     I may go both in and out of.