Louis MacNeice: Все стихи поэта

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Last before America

A spiral of green hay on the end of a rake:

The moment is sweat and sun-prick---children and old women

Big in a tiny field, midgets against the mountain,

So toy-like yet so purposed you could take

This for the Middle Ages.

Louis MacNeice

The Brandy Glass

Only let it form within his hands once more -

The moment cradled like a brandy glass.

Sitting alone in the empty dining hall…

From the chandeliers the snow begins to fall

Piling around carafes and table legs

And chokes the passage of the revolving door.

The last diner, like a ventriloquist's doll

Left by his master, gazes before him, begs:

Louis MacNeice

June Thunder

The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny

Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,

Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled

Mays and chestnuts

Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous

Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland—

All the flare and gusto of the unenduring

Joys of a season

Louis MacNeice

Epilogue

Rows of books around me stand,

Fence me in on either hand;

Through that forest of dead words

I would hunt the living birds -

So I write these lines for you

Who have felt the death-wish too,

All the wires are cut, my friends

Live beyond the severed ends.

Louis MacNeice

Eclogue by a Five-barred Gate

Well, I dreamt it was a hot day, the territorials

Were out on melting asphalt under the howitzers,

The brass music bounced on the houses. Come

I heard cry as it were a water-nymph, come and fulfil me

And I sped floating, my feet plashing in the tops of the wheat

But my eyes were blind,

I found her with my hands lying on the drying hay,

Wet heat in the deeps of the hay, as my hand delved,

Louis MacNeice

Carrickfergus

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries

To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:

Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim

Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

Louis MacNeice

The Suicide

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact

Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,

This man you never heard of. These are the bills

In the intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda stacked

Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed

Jury of his unanswered correspondence

Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze

From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked

Louis MacNeice

Autobiography

In my childhood trees were green

And there was plenty to be seen.

Come back early or never come.

My father made the walls resound,

He wore his collar the wrong way round.

Come back early or never come.

My mother wore a yellow dress;

Gently, gently, gentleness.

Louis MacNeice

Soap Suds

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

Louis MacNeice

Christina

It all began so easy

With bricks upon the floor

Building motley houses

And knocking down your houses

And always building more.

The doll was called Christina,

Her under-wear was lace,

She smiled while you dressed her

Louis MacNeice

House On A Cliff

Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors

The winking signal on the waste of sea.

Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind.

Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.

Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors

The strong man pained to find his red blood cools,

While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors

The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.

Louis MacNeice

Sunday Morning

Down the road someone is practising scales,

The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,

Man's heart expands to tinker with his car

For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;

Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,

Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast

That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,

Louis MacNeice