Уистан Оден - Стихи и эссе

     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.

     A living-room, the catholic area you
     (Thou, rather) and I may enter
     without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts
     each visitor with a style,

     a secular faith: he compares its dogmas
     with his, and decides whether
     he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms
     where nothing's left lying about

     chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared
     with lip-stick: the homes I warm to,
     though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling
     of bills being promptly settled

     with cheques that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant,
     only Thou and I, two regions
     of protestant being which nowhere overlap:
     a room is too small, therefore,

     if its occupants cannot forget at will
     that they are not alone, too big
     if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel
     for raising their voices. What,

     quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly,
     ours is a sitting culture
     in a generation which prefers comfort
     (or is forced to prefer it)

     to command, would rather incline its buttocks
     on a well-upholstered chair
     than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance
     at book-titles would tell him

     that we belong to the clerisy and spend much
     on our food. But could he read
     what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures
     frighten us most, or what names

     head our roll-call of persons we would least like
     to go to bed with? What draws
     singular lives together in the first place,
     loneliness, lust, ambition,

     or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop
     or murder one another
     clear enough: how they create, though, a common world
     between them, like Bombelli's

     impossible yet useful numbers, no one
     has yet explained. Still, they do
     manage to forgive impossible behavior,
     to endure by some miracle

     conversational tics and larval habits
     without wincing (were you to die,
     I should miss yours). It's a wonder that neither
     has been butchered by accident,

     or, as lots have, silently vanished into
     History's criminal noise
     unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years,
     we should sit here in Austria

     as cater-cousins, under the glassy look
     of a Naples Bambino,
     the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky,
     doing British cross-word puzzles,

     is very odd indeed. I'm glad the builder gave
     our common-room small windows
     through which no observed outsider can observe us:
     every home should be a fortress,

     equipped with all the very latest engines
     for keeping Nature at bay,
     versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling
     the Dark Lord and his hungry

     animivorous chimaeras. (Any brute
     can buy a machine in a shop,
     but the sacred spells are secret to the kind,
     and if power is what we wish

     they won't work.) The ogre will come in any case:
     so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit,
     fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
     the Spirit we die, but life

     without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
     and always, though truth and love
     can never really differ, when they seem to,
     the subaltern should be truth.

        The Ogre does what ogres can,
        Deeds quite impossible for Man,
        But one prize is beyond his reach,
        The Ogre cannot master Speech.
        About a subjugated plain,
        Among its desperate and slain,
        The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
        While drivel gushes from his lips.

     It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for
     so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
        it would not have occurred to women
        to think worth while, made possible only

     because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
     the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
        hurrah the deed, although the motives
        that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.

     A grand gesture. But what does it period?
     What does it osse? We were always adroiter
        with objects than lives, and more facile
        at courage than kindness: from the moment

     the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
     a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's,
        still don't fit us exactly, modern
        only in this-our lack of decorum.

     Homer's heroes were certainly no braver
     than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
        was excused the insult of having
        his valor covered by television.

     Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
     Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
        and was not charmed: give me a watered
        lively garden, remote from blatherers

     about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
     on August mornings I can count the morning
        glories where to die has a meaning,
        and no engine can shift my perspective.

     Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
     as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
        Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
        still visits my Austrian several

     with His old detachment, and the old warnings
     still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
        an ugly finish, Irreverence
        is a greater oaf than Superstition.

     Our apparatniks will continue making
     the usual squalid mess called History:
        all we can pray for is that artists,
        chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.