W H Auden: Все стихи поэта

Все стихи Оригиналы Переводы

1 2 3 4 5 › »

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.

by W H Auden

Canzone

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,

We cannot choose what we are free to love?

Although the mouse we banished yesterday

Is an enraged rhinoceros today,

Our value is more threatened than we know:

Shabby objections to our present day

Go snooping round its outskirts; night and day

Faces, orations, battles, bait our will

by W H Auden

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river

I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of the railway:

'Love has no ending.

by W H Auden

As We Like It

Certainly our city with its byres of poverty down to

The river's edge, its cathedral, its engines, its dogs;

Here is the cosmopolitan cooking

And the light alloys and the glass.

Built by the conscience-stricken, the weapon-making,

By us. Wild rumours woo and terrify the crowd,

Woo us. Betrayers thunder at, blackmail

Us. But where now are They.

by W H Auden

Roman Wall Blues

Over the heather the wet wind blows,

I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,

I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,

My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,

I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

by W H Auden

The Hidden Law

The Hidden Law does not deny

Our laws of probability,

But takes the atom and the star

And human beings as they are,

And answers nothing when we lie.

It is the only reason why

No government can codify,

And verbal definitions mar

by W H Auden

At the Party

Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed

The ground-bass is reciprocal mistrust.

The names in fashion shuttling to and fro

Yield, when deciphered, messages of woe.

You cannot read me like an open book.

I'm more myself than you will ever look.

by W H Auden

Atlantis

Being set on the idea

Of getting to Atlantis,

You have discovered of course

Only the Ship of Fools is

Making the voyage this year,

As gales of abnormal force

Are predicted, and that you

Must therefore be ready to

by W H Auden

Kairos and Logos

Around them boomed the rhetoric of time,

The smells and furniture of the known world

Where conscience worshipped an aesthetic order

And what was unsuccessful was condemned;

And, at the centre of its vast self-love,

The emperor and his pleasures, dreading death.

In lovely verse that military order,

by W H Auden

A New Age

So an age ended, and its last deliverer died

In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:

The sudden shadow of a giant's enormous calf

Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.

They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt

A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,

But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath:

A kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out.

by W H Auden

After Reading A Child's Guide To Modern Physics

If all a top physicist knows

About the Truth be true,

Then, for all the so-and-so's,

Futility and grime,

Our common world contains,

We have a better time

Than the Greater Nebulae do,

Or the atoms in our brains.

by W H Auden

Base Words Are Uttered

Base words are uttered only by the base

And can for such at once be understood,

But noble platitudes:—ah, there's a case

Where the most careful scrutiny is needed

To tell a voice that's genuinely good

From one that's base but merely has succeeded.

by W H Auden