Стихи и эссе - Уистан Оден

1938

from In Time of War

        I

     So from the years the gifts were showered; each     Ran off with his at once into his life:     Bee took the politics that make a hive,     Fish swam as fish, peach settled into peach.

     And were successful at the first endeavour;     The hour of birth their only time at college,     They were content with their precocious knowledge,     And knew their station and were good for ever.

     Till finally there came a childish creature     On whom the years could model any feature,     And fake with ease a leopard or a dove;

     Who by the lightest wind was changed and shaken,     And looked for truth and was continually mistaken,     Ana envied his few friends and chose his love.

        VIII

     He turned his field into a meeting-place,     And grew the tolerant ironic eye,     And formed the mobile money-changer's face,     And found the notion of equality.

     And strangers were as brothers to his clocks,     And with his spires he made a human sky;     Museums stored his learning like a box,     And paper watched his money like a spy.

     It grew so fast his life was overgrown,     And he forgot what once it had been made for,     And gathered into crowds and was alone,

     And lived expensively and did without,     And could not find the earth which he had paid for,     Nor feel the love that he knew all about.

        XXI

     The life of man is never quite completed;     The daring and the chatter will go on:     But, as an artist feels his power gone,     These walk the earth and know themselves defeated.

     Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for     The wounded myths that once made nations good,     Some lost a world they never understood,     Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.

     Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety     Receives them like a grand hotel; but where     They may regret they must; their life, to hear

     The call of the forbidden cities, see     The stranger watch them with a happy stare,     And Freedom hostile in each home and tree.

        XXV

     Nothing is given: we must find our law.     Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination;     Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation     The low recessive houses of the poor.

     We have no destiny assigned us:     Nothing is certain but the body; we plan     To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us     Of the equality of man.

     Children are really loved here, even by police:     They speak of years before the big were lonely,     And will be lost.

         And only     The brass bands throbbing in the parks foretell     Some future reign of happiness and peace.

     We learn to pity and rebel.

1938

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

(d. Jan. 1939)

        I

     He disappeared in the dead of winter:     The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,     And snow disfigured the public statues;     The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.     What instruments we have 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 his 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.     What instruments we have agree     The day of his death was a dark cold day.

        II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:     The parish 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 making where executives     Would never want to tamper, flows on 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.

     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.

     Follow, poet, follow right     To the bottom of the night,     With your unconstraining voice     Still persuade us to rejoice;

     With the firming of a verse     Make a vineyard of the curse,     Sing of human unsuccess     In a rapture of distress;

     In the deserts of the heart     Let the healing fountain start,     In the prison of his days     Teach the free man how to praise.

1939

Law Like Love

     Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,     Law is the one     All gardeners obey     To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

     Law is the wisdom of the old,     The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;     The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,     Law is the senses of the young.

     Law, says the priest with a priestly look,     Expounding to an unpriestly people,     Law is the words in my priestly book,     Law is my pulpit and my steeple.     Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,     Speaking clearly and most severely,     Law is as I've told you before,     Law is as you know I suppose,     Law is but let me explain it once more,     Law is The Law.

     Yet law-abiding scholars write:     Law is neither wrong nor right,     Law is only crimes     Punished by places and by times,     Law is the clothes men wear     Anytime, anywhere,     Law is Good-morning and Good-night.

     Others say, Law is our Fate;     Others say, Law is our State;     Others say, others say     Law is no more,     Law has gone away.

     And always the loud angry crowd,     Very angry and very loud,     Law is We,     And always the soft idiot softly Me.

     If we, dear, know we know no more     Than they about the Law,     If I no more than you     Know what we should and should not do     Except that all agree     Gladly or miserably     That the Law is     And that all know this,     If therefore thinking it absurd     To identify Law with some other word,     Unlike so many men     I cannot say Law is again,     No more than they can we suppress     The universal wish to guess     Or slip out of our own position     Into an unconcerned condition.     Although I can at least confine     Your vanity and mine     To stating tirmidly     A timid similarity,     We shall boast anyway:     Like love I say.

     Like love we don't know where or why,     Like love we can't compel or fly,     Like love we often weep,     Like love we seldom keep.

1939

Under Which Lyre

A REACTIONARY TRACT FOR THE TIMES (Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Harvard, 1946)

     Ares at last has quit the field,     The bloodstains on the bushes yield        To seeping showers,     And in their convalescent state     The fractured towns associate        With summer flowers.

     Encamped upon the college plain     Raw veterans already train        As freshman forces;     Instructors with sarcastic tongue     Shepherd the battle-weary young        Through basic courses.

     Among bewildering appliances     For mastering the arts and sciences        They stroll or run,     And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter     Are shot to pieces by the shorter        Poems of Donne.

     Professors back from secret missions     Resume their proper eruditions,        Though some regret it;     They liked their dictaphones a lot,     They met some big wheels, and do not        Let you forget it.

     But Zeus' inscrutable decree     Permits the will-to-disagree        To be pandemic,     Ordains that vaudeville shall preach     And every commencement speech        Be a polemic.

     Let Ares doze, that other war     Is instantly declared once more        'Twixt those who follow     Precocious Hermes all the way     And those who without qualms obey        Pompous Apollo.

     Brutal like all Olympic games,     Though fought with similes and Christian names        And less dramatic,     This dialectic strife between     The civil gods is just as mean,        And more fanatic.

     What high immortals do in mirth     Is life and death on Middle Earth;        Their a-historic     Antipathy forever gripes     All ages and somatic types,        The sophomoric

     Who face the future's darkest hints     With giggles or with prairie squints        As stout as Cortez,     And those who like myself turn pale     As we approach with ragged sail        The fattening forties.

     The sons of Hermes love to play,     And only do their best when they        Are told they oughtn't;     Apollo's children never shrink     From boring jobs but have to think        Their work important.

     Related by antithesis,     A compromise between us is        Impossible;     Respect perhaps but friendship never:     Falstaff the fool confronts forever        The prig Prince Hal.

     If he would leave the self alone,     Apollo's welcome to the throne,        Fasces and falcons;     He loves to rule, has always done it;     The earth would soon, did Hermes run it,        Be like the Balkans.

     But jealous of our god of dreams,     His common-sense in secret schemes        To rule the heart;     Unable to invent the lyre,     Creates with simulated fire        Official art.

     And when he occupies a college,     Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;        He pays particular     Attention to Commercial Thought,     Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,        In his curricula.

     Athletic, extrovert and crude,     For him, to work in solitude        Is the offence,     The goal a populous Nirvana:     His shield bears this device: Mens sana     Qui mal y pense.

     To-day his arms, we must confess,     From Right to Left have met success,        His banners wave     From Yale to Princeton, and the news     From Broadway to the Book Reviews        Is very grave.

     His radio Homers all day long     In over-Whitmanated song        That does not scan,     With adjectives laid end to end,     Extol the doughnut and commend        The Common Man.

     His, too, each homely lyric thing     On sport or spousal love or spring        Or dogs or dusters,     Invented by some court-house bard     For recitation by the yard        In filibusters.

     To him ascend the prize orations     And sets of fugal variations        On some folk-ballad,     While dietitians sacrifice     A glass of prune-juice or a nice        Marsh-mallow salad.

     Charged with his compound of sensational     Sex plus some undenominational        Religious matter,     Enormous novels by co-eds     Rain down on our defenceless heads        Till our teeth chatter.

     In fake Hermetic uniforms     Behind our battle-line, in swarms        That keep alighting,     His existentialists declare     That they are in complete despair,        Yet go on writing.

     No matter; He shall be defied;     White Aphrodite is on our side:        What though his threat     To organize us grow more critical?     Zeus willing, we, the unpolitical,        Shall beat him yet.

     Lone scholars, sniping from the walls     Of learned periodicals,        Our facts defend,     Our intellectual marines,     Landing in little magazines,        Capture a trend.

     By night our student Underground     At cocktail parties whisper round        From ear to ear;     Fat figures in the public eye     Collapse next morning, ambushed by        Some witty sneer.

     In our morale must lie our strength:     So, that we may behold at length        Routed Apollo's     Battalions melt away like fog,     Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,        Which runs as follows:-

     Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,     Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis        On education,     Thou shalt not worship projects nor     Shalt thou or thine bow down before        Administration.

     Thou shalt not answer questionnaires     Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,        Nor with compliance     Take any test. Thou shalt not sit     With statisticians nor commit        A social science.

     Thou shalt not be on friendly terms     With guys in advertising firms,        Nor speak with such     As read the Bible for its prose,     Nor, above all, make love to those        Who wash too much.

     Thou shalt not live within thy means     Nor on plain water and raw greens.        If thou must choose     Between the chances, choose the odd;     Read The New Yorker, trust in God;        And take short views.

1946