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Уистан Хью Оден - Оден - Selected poems

Проза и поэзия >> Русская и зарубежная поэзия >> Зарубежная поэзия >> Уистан Хью Оден
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W.H.Auden. Selected poems

-------- CONTENTS


     W. H. Auden by J. D. McClatchy


     The Wanderer

     O Where Are You Going?

     Our Hunting Fathers

     On This Island

     As I Walked Out One Evening

     Fish in the Unruffled Lakes

     Autumn Song

     Death's Echo

     Musée des Beaux Arts

     from In Time of War

     In Memory of W. B. Yeats

     Law Like Love

     Under Which Lyre

     A Walk After Dark

     The More Loving One

     The Shield of Achilles

     Friday's Child

     Thanksgiving for a Habitat

     The Common Life

     August 1968

     Moon Landing

     River Profile

     A New Year Greeting


     In certain poems the audio version differs from the published text.
-------- W. H. AUDEN


     (from a preface by J. D. McClatchy)


     When he arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate, W. H. Auden went to see his tutor in literature, who asked the young man what he meant to do in later life. "I am going to be a poet," Auden answered. "Ah, yes," replied the tutor, and began a small lecture on verse exercises improving one's prose. Auden scowled. "You don't understand at all," he interrupted. "I mean a great poet."
-------- The Wanderer


     Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

     Upon what man it fall

     In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,

     Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,

     That he should leave his house,

     No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;

     But ever that man goes

     Through place-keepers, through forest trees,

     A stranger to strangers over undried sea,

     Houses for fishes, suffocating water,

     Or lonely on fell as chat,

     By pot-holed becks

     A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.

     There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,

     And dreams of home,

     Waving from window, spread of welcome,

     Kissing of wife under single sheet;

     But waking sees

     Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices

     Of new men making another love.


     Save him from hostile capture,

     From sudden tiger's leap at corner;

     Protect his house,

     His anxious house where days are counted

     From thunderbolt protect,

     From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;

     Converting number from vague to certain,

     Bring joy, bring day of his returning,

     Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.


     1930
-------- O Where Are You Going?


     "O where are you going?" said reader to rider,

     "That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,

     Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,

     That gap is the grave where the tall return."


     "O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,

     "That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,

     Your diligent looking discover the lacking,

     Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"


     "O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,

     "Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?

     Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,

     The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."


     "Out of this house"---said rider to reader,

     "Yours never will"---said farer to fearer

     "They're looking for you"---said hearer to horror,

     As he left them there, as he left them there.


     1931
-------- Hunting Fathers


     Our hunting fathers told the story

     Of the sadness of the creatures,

     Pitied the limits and the lack

     Set in their finished features;

     Saw in the lion's intolerant look,

     Behind the quarry's dying glare,

     Love raging for, the personal glory

     That reason's gift would add,

     The liberal appetite and power,

     The rightness of a god.


     Who, nurtured in that fine tradition,

     Predicted the result,

     Guessed Love by nature suited to

     The intricate ways of guilt,

     That human ligaments could so

     His southern gestures modify

     And make it his mature ambition

     To think no thought but ours,

     To hunger, work illegally,

     And be anonymous?


     1934
-------- On This Island


     Look, stranger, on this island now

     The leaping light for your delight discovers,

     Stand stable here

     And silent be,

     That through the channels of the ear

     May wander like a river

     The swaying sound of the sea.


     Here at a small field's ending pause

     Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges

     Oppose the pluck

     And knock of the tide,

     And the shingle scrambles after the suck-

     -ing surf, and a gull lodges

     A moment on its sheer side.


     Far off like floating seeds the ships

     Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,

     And this full view

     Indeed may enter

     And move in memory as now these clouds do,

     That pass the harbour mirror

     And all the summer through the water saunter.


     1935
-------- 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.


     "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you

     Till China and Africa meet,

     And the river jumps over the mountain

     And the salmon sing in the street,


     "I'll love you till the ocean

     Is folded and hung up to dry

     And the seven stars go squawking

     Like geese about the sky.


     "The years shall run like rabbits,

     For in my arms I hold

     The Flower of the Ages,

     And the first love of the world."


     But all the clocks in the city

     Began to whirr and chime:

     "O let not Time deceive you,

     You cannot conquer Time.


     "In the burrows of the Nightmare

     Where Justice naked is,

     Time watches from the shadow

     And coughs when you would kiss.


     "In headaches and in worry

     Vaguely life leaks away,

     And Time will have his fancy

     To-morrow or to-day.


     "Into many a green valley

     Drifts the appalling snow;

     Time breaks the threaded dances

     And the diver's brilliant bow.


     "O plunge your hands in water,

     Plunge them in up to the wrist;

     Stare, stare in the basin

     And wonder what you've missed.


     "The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

     The desert sighs in the bed,

     And the crack in the tea-cup opens

     A lane to the land of the dead.


     "Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

     And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

     And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

     And Jill goes down on her back.


     "O look, look in the mirror,

     O look in your distress;

     Life remains a blessing

     Although you cannot bless.


     "O stand, stand at the window

     As the tears scald and start;

     You shall love your crooked nelghbour

     With your crooked heart."


     It was late, late in the evening,

     The lovers they were gone;

     The clocks had ceased their chiming,

     And the deep river ran on.


     1937
-------- Fish in the Unruffled Lakes


     Fish in the unruffled lakes

     Their swarming colours wear,

     Swans in the winter air

     A white perfection have,

     And the great lion walks

     Through his innocent grove;

     Lion, fish and swan

     Act, and are gone

     Upon Time's toppling wave.


     We, till shadowed days are done,

     We must weep and sing

     Duty's conscious wrong,

     The Devil in the clock,

     The goodness carefully worn

     For atonement or for luck;

     We must lose our loves,

     On each beast and bird that moves

     Turn an envious look.


     Sighs for folly done and said

     Twist our narrow days,

     But I must bless, I must praise

     That you, my swan, who have

     All gifts that to the swan

     Impulsive Nature gave,

     The majesty and pride,

     Last night should add

     Your voluntary love.


     1936
-------- Autumn Song


     Now the leaves are falling fast,

     Nurse's flowers will not last;

     Nurses to the graves are gone,

     And the prams go rolling on.


     Whispering neighbours, left and right,

     Pluck us from the real delight;

     And the active hands must freeze

     Lonely on the separate knees.


     Dead in hundreds at the back

     Follow wooden in our track,

     Arms raised stiffly to reprove

     In false attitudes of love.


     Starving through the leafless wood

     Trolls run scolding for their food;

     And the nightingale is dumb,

     And the angel will not come.


     Cold, impossible, ahead

     Lifts the mountain's lovely head

     Whose white waterfall could bless

     Travellers in their last distress.


     1936
-------- Death's Echo


     "O who can ever gaze his fill,"

     Farmer and fisherman say,

     "On native shore and local hill,

     Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?

     Father, grandfather stood upon this land,

     And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand."

     So farmer and fisherman say

     In their fortunate hey-day:

     But Death's low answer drifts across

     Empty catch or harvest loss

     Or an unlucky May.

     The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,

     Not to be born is the best for man;

     The end of toil is a bailiff's order,

     Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.


     "O life's too short for friends who share,"

     Travellers think in their hearts,

     "The city's common bed, the air,

     The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,

     Where incidents draw every day from each

     Memorable gesture and witty speech."

     So travellers think in their hearts,

     Till malice or circumstance parts

     Them from their constant humour:

     And slyly Death's coercive rumour

     In that moment starts.

     A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus,

     Not to be born is the best for man;

     An active partner in something disgraceful,

     Change your partner, dance while you can.


     "O stretch your hands across the sea,"

     The impassioned lover cries,

     "Stretch them towards your harm and me.

     Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed,

     The stream sings at its foot, and at its head

     The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed."

     So the impassioned lover cries

     Till the storm of pleasure dies:

     From the bedpost and the rocks

     Death's enticing echo mocks,

     And his voice replies.

     The greater the love, the more false to its object,

     Not to be born is the best for man;

     After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle,

     Break the embraces, dance while you can.


     "I see the guilty world forgiven,"

     Dreamer and drunkard sing,

     "The ladders let down out of heaven,

     The laurel springing from the martyr's blood,

     The children skipping where the weeper stood,

     The lovers natural and the beasts all good."

     So dreamer and drunkard sing

     Till day their sobriety bring:

     Parrotwise with Death's reply

     From whelping fear and nesting lie,

     Woods and their echoes ring.

     The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,

     Not to be born is the best for man;

     The second-best is a formal order,

     The dance's pattern; dance while you can.


     Dance, dancefor the figure is easy,

     The tune is catching and will not stop;

     Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;

     Dance, dance, dance till you drop.


     1936
-------- Musée des Beaux Arts


     About suffering they were never wrong,

     The Old Masters: how well they understood

     Its human position; how it takes place

     While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

     How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

     For the miraculous birth, there always must be

     Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

     On a pond at the edge of the wood:

     They never forgot

     That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

     Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

     Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

     Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


     In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

     Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

     Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

     But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

     As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

     Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

     Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

     Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


     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
-------- A Walk After Dark


     A cloudless night like this

     Can set the spirit soaring:

     After a tiring day

     The clockwork spectacle is

     Impressive in a slightly boring

     Eighteenth-century way.


     It soothed adolescence a lot

     To meet so shameless a stare;

     The things I did could not

     Be so shocking as they said

     If that would still be there

     After the shocked were dead.


     Now, unready to die

     But already at the stage

     When one starts to resent the young,

     I am glad those points in the sky

     May also be counted among

     The creatures of Middle-age.


     It's cosier thinking of night

     As more an Old People's Home

     Than a shed for a faultless machine,

     That the red pre-Cambrian light

     Is gone like Imperial Rome

     Or myself at seventeen.


     Yet however much we may like

     The stoic manner in which

     The classical authors wrote,

     Only the young and the rich

     Have the nerve or the figure to strike

     The lacrimae rerum note.


     For the present stalks abroad

     Like the past and its wronged again

     Whimper and are ignored,

     And the truth cannot be hid;

     Somebody chose their pain,

     What needn't have happened did.


     Occurring this very night

     By no established rule,

     Some event may already have hurled

     Its first little No at the right

     Of the laws we accept to school

     Our post-diluvian world:


     But the stars burn on overhead,

     Unconscious of final ends,

     As I walk home to bed,

     Asking what judgement waits

     My person, all my friends,

     And these United States.


     1948
-------- The More Loving One


     Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

     That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

     But on earth indifference is the least

     We have to dread from man or beast.


     How should we like it were stars to burn

     With a passion for us we could not return?

     If equal affection cannot be,

     Let the more loving one be me.


     Admirer as I think I am

     Of stars that do not give a damn,

     I cannot, now I see them, say

     I missed one terribly all day.


     Were all stars to disappear or die,

     I should learn to look at an empty sky

     And feel its total dark sublime,

     Though this might take me a little time.


     1957
-------- The Shield of Achilles


     She looked over his shoulder

     For vines and olive trees,

     Marble well-governed cities

     And ships upon untamed seas,

     But there on the shining metal

     His hands had put instead

     An artificial wilderness

     And a sky like lead.


     A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

     No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,

     Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,

     Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

     An unintelligible multitude,

     A million eyes, a million boots in line,

     Without expression, waiting for a sign.


     Out of the air a voice without a face

     Proved by statistics that some cause was just

     In tones as dry and level as the place:

     No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

     Column by column in a cloud of dust

     They marched away enduring a belief

     Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.


     She looked over his shoulder

     For ritual pieties,

     White flower-garlanded heifers,

    

... ... ...
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Была у Вовочки корова. А у Маши бык. Привел как-то раз Вовочка свою
корову к Машиному бычку. Бык залез на корову, а Вовочка и Маша сидят
и смотрят. Через некоторое время:
Вовочка:

- Может тоже попробовать?
Маша:

- Смотри сам, ... твоя же корова!
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