нам по нраву:

иные вызывают омерзенье.

Нет ничего Распятому противней, чем

в его же честь

устроенная бойня.

КОДА:

Из археологии одну,

по крайней мере, извлечем мораль,

а именно, что все

учебники нам лгут.

Тому, что мы Историей зовем,

на самом деле, вовсе нечем хвастать,

лишь порождение

всего дурного в нас

лишь наша доброта в веках пребудет.

Август 1973

AUGUST 1968

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.

September 1968

АВГУСТ 1968

Людоед творит, похоже,

То, что Человек не может,

Одного не одолеть

Связной речью овладеть,

По истерзанной долине,

По слезам и мертвечине

Он, ступая руки в боки,

Льет беcсмыслицы потоки.

Сентябрь 1968

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS

(d. January 1939)

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted?

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

O all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The provinces of his body revolted,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,

And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom;

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

O all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;

The parich of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its saying where executives

Would never want to tamper; it flows south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest;

William Yeats is laid to rest:

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant,

Of the brave and innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whome it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.