Victoria Sackville West: Всі вірші поета

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Moonlight

What time the meanest brick and stone

Take on a beauty not their own,

And past the flaw of builded wood

Shines the intention whole and good,

And all the little homes of man

Rise to a dimmer, nobler span;

When colour's absence gives escape

To the deeper spirit of the shape,

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Victoria Sackville West

Days I enjoy

Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,

When I have no engagements written on my block,

When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,

When no one comes to take me away from myself

And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,

A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,

Being so contrived that it takes too long a time

To get myself back to myself when they have gone.

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Victoria Sackville West

The Greater Cats

The greater cats with golden eyes

Stare out between the bars.

Deserts are there, and the different skies,

And night with different stars.

They prowl the aromatic hill,

And mate as fiercely as they kill,

To roam, to live, to drink their fill;

But this beyond their wit know I:

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Victoria Sackville West

Full Moon

She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers

Someone had brought her from Ispahan,

And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,

And the coral-hafted feather fan;

But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,

And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.

She cared not a rap for all the big planets,

For Betelgeuse or Aldebaran,

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Victoria Sackville West

And so it ends

And so it ends,

We who were lovers may be friends.

I have some weeks in which to steel

My heart and teach myself to feel

Only a sober tenderness

Where once was passion's loveliness.

I had not thought that there would come

Your touch to make our music dumb,

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Victoria Sackville West

Leopards at Knole

Leopards on the gable-ends,

Leopards on the painted stair,

Stiff the blazoned shield they bear,

Or and gules, a bend of vair,

Leopards on the gable-ends,

Leopards everywhere.

Guard and vigil in the night

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Beechwoods at Knole

How do I love you, beech-trees, in the autumn,

Your stone-grey columns a cathedral nave

Processional above the earth's brown glory!

I was a child, and I loved the knurly tangle

Of roots that coiled above a scarp like serpents,

Where I might hide my treasure with the squirrels.

I was a child, and splashed my way in laughter

Through drifts of leaves, where underfoot the beech-nuts

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by Victoria Sackville West

Evening

When little lights in little ports come out,

Quivering down through water with the stars,

And all the fishing fleet of slender spars

Range at their moorings, veer with tide about;

When race of wind is stilled and sails are furled,

And underneath our single riding-light

The curve of black-ribbed deck gleams palely white,

And slumbrous waters pool a slumbrous world;

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by Victoria Sackville West

Bee-Master

I have known honey from the Syrian hills

Stored in cool jars; the wild acacia there

On the rough terrace where the locust shrills

Tosses her spindrift on the ringing air.

Narcissus bares his nectarous perianth

In white and golden tabard to the sun,

And while the workers rob the amaranth

Or scarlet windflower low among the stone,

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Tuscany

Cisterns and stones; the fig-tree in the wall

Casts down her shadow, ashen as her boughs,

Across the road, across the thick white dust.

Down from the hill the slow white oxen crawl,

Dragging the purple waggon heaped with must,

With scarlet tassels on their milky brows,

Gentle as evening moths. Beneath the yoke

Lounging against the shaft they fitful strain

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A Saxon Song

Tools with the comely names,

Mattock and scythe and spade,

Couth and bitter as flames,

Clean, and bowed in the blade,--

A man and his tools make a man and his trade.

Breadth of the English shires,

Hummock and kame and mead,

Tang of the reeking byres,

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Song

If I had only loved your flesh

And careless damned your soul to Hell,

I might have laughed and loved afresh,

And loved as lightly and as well,

And little more to tell.

But since to clasp your soul I strove,

(That mountebank, that fugitive)

Anrl poured the river of my love

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by Victoria Sackville West