外国著名诗歌欣赏

时间:2021-08-31

  诗歌欣赏A Purchase of Porcelain

外国著名诗歌欣赏

  Because the king

  decrees that every Jew

  must buy his wedding-right

  in unsold porcelain

  from the royal chinaworks,

  here he stands, an amorous Jew,

  gazing at luminous

  suns and moons arrayed

  on doths of velvet-blue,

  earth that has married fire twice,

  that has been shaped and named

  for what it comprehends: sherbets, salads,

  gravies, desserts. He lifts a platter fine

  as alabaster in cathedral windows:

  salvation, the passage of light

  through bone. Ah, but

  not for you, the store-man says.

  Closeted, in shipping crates

  are pieces no one else will buy

  baboon fops in feathered caps,

  chimpanzees in petticoats.

  Visitors will later testify,

  his home was comfortable,

  despite the china apes

  peering from every corner.

诗歌欣赏:Batuschka

  From yonder gilded minaret

  Beside the steel-blue Neva set,

  I faintly catch, from time to time,

  The sweet, aerial midnight chime——

  "God save the Tsar!"

  Above the ravelins and the moats

  Of the white citadel it floats;

  And men in dungeons far beneath

  Listen, and pray, and gnash their teeth——

  "God save the Tsar!"

  The soft reiterations sweep

  Across the horror of their sleep,

  a term of endearment applied

  to the Tsar in Russian folk-song.

  As if some daemon in his glee

  Were mocking at their misery——

  "God save the Tsar!"

  In his Red Palace over there,

  Wakeful, he needs must hear the prayer.

  How can it drown the broken cries

  Wrung from his children's agonies?——

  "God save the Tsar!"

  Father they called him from of old——

  Batuschka! . . . How his heart is cold!

  Wait till a million scourged men

  Rise in their awful might, and then——

  God save the Tsar!

诗歌欣赏:Camma

  Camma

  (To Ellen Terry)

  As one who poring on a Grecian urn

  Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made,

  God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid,

  And for their beauty's sake is loth to turn

  And face the obvious day, must I not yearn

  For many a secret moon of indolent bliss,

  When in midmost shrine of Artemis

  I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern?

  And yet - methinks I'd rather see thee play

  That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery

  Made Emperors drunken, - come, great Egypt, shake

  Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,

  I am grown sick of unreal passions, make

  The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!

诗歌欣赏:A Prayer for My Son

  Bid a strong ghost stand at the head

  That my Michael may sleep sound,

  Nor cry, nor turn in the bed

  Till his morning meal come round;

  And may departing twilight keep

  All dread afar till morning‘s back,

  That his mother may not lack

  Her fill of sleep.

  Bid the ghost have sword in fist:

  Some there are, for I avow

  Such devilish things exist,

  Who have planned his murder, for they know

  Of some most haughty deed or thought

  That waits upon his future days,

  And would through hatred of the bays

  Bring that to nought.

  Though You can fashion everything

  From nothing every day, and teach

  The morning stars to sing,

  You have lacked articulate speech

  To tell Your simplest want, and known,

  Wailing upon a woman‘s knee,

  All of that worst ignominy

  Of flesh and bone;

  And when through all the town there ran

  The servants of Your enemy,

  A woman and a man,

  Unless the Holy Writings lie,

  Hurried through the smooth and rough

  And through the fertile and waste,

  Protecting, till the danger past,

  With human love.

  A Path Between Houses

  Where is the dwelling place of light?

  And where is the house of darkness?

  Go about; walk the limits of the land.

  Do you know a path between them?

  Job 38:19-20

  The enigma of August.

  Season of dust and teenage arson.

  The nightly whine of pickup trucks

  bouncing through the sumac

  beneath the Co-Operative power lines,

  country & western booming from woofers

  carved into the doors. A trace of smoke

  when the wins shifts,

  spun gravel rattling the fenders of cars,

  the groan of clutch and transaxle,

  pickup trucks, arriving at a friction point,

  gunning from nowhere to nowhere.

  The duets begin. A compact disc,

  a single line of muted trumpet,

  plays against the sirens

  pursuing the smoke of grass fires.

  I love a painter. On a new canvas,

  she paints the neighbor's field.

  She paints it without trees,

  and paints the field beyond the field,

  the field that has no trees,

  and the upturned Jesus boat,

  made into a planter,

  "For God so loved the world. . ."

  a citation from John, chapter and verse,

  splattered across the bow

  the boat spills roses into the weeds.

  What does the stray dog know,

  after a taste of what is holy?

  The sun pulls her shadow toward me,

  an undulant shape that shelters the grass,

  an unaimed thing.

  In the gray house, the tiny house,

  in '52 there was a fire. The old woman,

  drunk and smoking cigarettes, fell asleep.

  The winter of the blizzard and her son

  Not coming home from the Yalu.

  There are times I still smell smoke.

  There are days I know she set the fire

  and why.

  Last night, lightning to the south.

  Here, nothing, though along the river

  the wind upends a willow,

  a gorgon of leaves and bottom-up clod

  browning in the afternoon sun.

  In the museum we dispute

  the poet's epiphany call——

  white light or more warmth?

  And what is the Greek word for the flesh,

  and the body apart from the spirit,

  meaning even the body opposed to the spirit?

  I do not know this word.

  Dante claims there are pools of fire

  in the middle regions of hell,

  but the lowest circles are lakes of ice,

  offering the hope our greatest sins

  aren't the passions but indifference.

  And the willow grew for years

  With no real hold upon the ground.

  How the accident occurred

  and how the sky got dark:

  Six miles from my house,

  a drunk leaves the Holiday Inn

  spins on 104 and smacks a utility pole.

  The power line sparks

  across the hood of his Ford

  and illuminates the crazed spider web

  of the windshield. His bloody tongue burns

  with a slurry gospel. Around me,

  the lights go down,

  the way death is described

  as armor crashing to the ground,

  the soul having already departed

  for another place. Was it his body I heard

  leaning against the horn,

  the body's final song, before the body

  slumped sideways in the seat?

  When I was a child,

  I would wake at night

  and imagine a field of asteroids, rolling

  across the walls of my room.

  In fact, I've seen them,

  like the last herd of buffalo,

  grazing against the background of fixed stars.

  Plate 420 shows the asteroid 433 Eros,

  the bright point of light, as it closes its approach

  to light. I loose myself in Cygnus,

  ancient kamikaze swan,

  rising or diving to earth,

  Draco, snarling at the polestar,

  and Pegasus, stone horse of the gods,

  ecstatic, looking one last time at home.

  August and the enigma it is.

  Days when I move in crabbed circles,

  nights when I walk with Jesus through the fields.

  What finally stands between us

  and the world of flying things?

  Mobbed by jays, the Cooper's hawk

  drops the dead bird. It tumbles

  beneath the cedar tree,

  tiny acrobat of death,

  a dead bird released

  in a failed act of atonement.

  A nest of wasps buzzing beneath the shingles,

  flickers drilling the cottonwood,

  jays, sparrows, the insistent wrens,

  the language of birds, heads cocked,

  staring the moon-eyed through the air.

  Sedge, asters, and fleabane,

  red tins of gasoline and glowing cigarettes,

  the midnight voice of a fourteen-year-old girl

  wailing the word "blue" from the pickup's open doors,

  illuminated by the dome light,

  the sulphurous rasp of another struck match,

  and foxglove, goldenrod and chicory,

  the dry flowers of late summer,

  an exhaustion I no longer look at.

  Time passes. The authorities

  gather the wreckage, the whirr

  of cicadas, and light dissembles the sky.

  A wind shift, and the Cedar Creek fire

  snaps the backfire line

  and roars through the cemetery.

  In the morning,

  I walk a path between houses.

  I cross to the water

  and circle again, the redwings

  forcing me back from the marsh.

  Smoke rises from a fire

  still smoldering along the power lines,

  flaring and exhausting itself

  in the shape of something lost.

  Grass fires, fires through the scrub

  of the clear-cut, fires in the pulpwood,

  cemetery fires,

  the powder of ash still untracked

  beneath the enormous trees,

  fires that explode the seed cones

  on the pines, the smoke of set fires

  and every good intention gone wrong,

  scorching the monuments

  above the graves of the dead.