Читать книгу Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry онлайн

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And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge—the sea’s edge barren and gray,

Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,

Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away

Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;

Dropping—a murmurous dropping—old silence and that one sound;

For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark—

Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,

For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,

Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,

And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.”

Often, too, there occur in his verse new and striking imagery, as in the superb epithetical value of the fourth line in the concluding stanza of “The Madness of King Goll,” one of the most beautiful of his poems—