Susa literatura - Poesia kaiera

Read by the poet at The Public Ceremonial of The National Institute of Arts and Letters at Carnegie Hall, New York, January 18th, 1941. // Great Muse, that from this hall absent for long / Has never been, / Great Muse of Song, / Colossal Muse of mighty Melody, / Vocal Calliope, / With thine august and contrapuntal brow / And thy vast throat builded for Harmony, / For the strict monumental pure design, / And the melodic line: / Be thou tonight with all beneath these rafters—be with me. // If I address thee in archaic style— / Words obsolete, words obsolescent, / It is that for a little while / The heart must, oh, indeed must from this angry and outrageous present / Itself withdraw / Into some past in which most crooked Evil, / Although quite certainly conceived and born, was not as yet the Law. // Archaic, or obsolescent at the least, / Be thy grave speaking and the careful words of thy clear song, / For the time wrongs us, and the words most common to our speech today / Salute and welcome to the feast / Conspicuous Evil—or against him all day long / Cry out, telling of ugly deeds and most uncommon wrong. // Be thou tonight with all beneath these rafters—be with me; / But oh, be more with those who are not free. / Who, herded into prison camps all shame must suffer and all outrage see. / Where music is not played nor sung, / Though the great voice be there, no sound from the dry throat across the thickened tongue / Comes forth; nor has he heart for it. / Beauty in all things—no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it. / Here it may dwell; / And with your aid, Melpomene / And all thy sister-muses (for ye are, I think, daughters of Memory) / Within the tortured mind as well. // Reaped are those fields with dragon's-teeth so lately sown; / Many the heaped men dying there—so close, hip touches thigh; yet each man dies alone. / Music, what overtone / For the soft ultimate sigh or the unheeded groan / Hast thou—to make death decent, where men slip / Down blood to death, no service of grieved heart or ritual lip / Transferring what was recently a man and still is warm— / Transferring his obedient limbs into the shallow grave where not again a friend shall greet him, / Nor hatred do him harm… / Nor true love run to meet him? // In the last hours of him who lies untended / On a cold field at night, and sees the hard bright stars / Above his upturned face, and says aloud, “How strange… my life is ended.”— / If in the past he loved great music much, and knew it well, / Let not his lapsing mind be teased by well-beloved but ill-remembered bars— / Let the full symphony across the blood-soaked field / By him be heard, most pure in every part, / The lonely horror of whose painful death is thus repealed / Who dies with quiet tears upon his upturned face, making to glow with softness the hard stars. // And bring to those who knew great poetry well / Page after page that they have loved but have not learned by heart! / We who in comfort to well-lighted shelves / Can turn for all the poets ever wrote, / Beseech you: Bear to those / Who love high art no less than we ourselves, / Those who lie wounded, those who in prison cast / Strive to recall, to ease them, some great ode, and every stanza save the last / Recall—oh, in the dark, restore them / The unremembered lines; make bright the page before them! / Page after page present to these, / In prison concentrated, watched by barbs of bayonet and wire, / Give ye to them their hearts' intense desire— / The words of Shelley, Virgil, Sophocles. // And thou, O lovely and not sad, / Euterpe, be thou in this hall tonight! / Bid us remember all we ever had / Of sweet and gay delight— / We who are free, / But cannot quite be glad, / Thinking of huge, abrupt disaster brought / Upon so many of our kind / Who treasure as do we the vivid look on the unfrightened face, / The careless happy stride from place to place, / And the unbounded regions of untrammeled thought / Open as interstellar space / To the exploring and excited mind. // O Muses, O immortal Nine!— / Or do ye languish? Can ye die? / Must all go under?— / How shall we heal without your help a world / By these wild horses torn asunder? / How shall we build anew?—how start again? / How cure, how even moderate this pain / Without you, and you strong? / And if ye sleep, then waken! / And if ye sicken and do plan to die, / Do not that now! // Hear us, in what sharp need we cry! / For we have help nowhere / If not in you! / Pity can much, and so a mighty mind, but cannot all things do!– / By you forsaken, / We shall be scattered, we shall be overtaken! / Oh, come! Renew in us the ancient wonder, / The grace of life, its courage, and its joy! / Weave us those garlands nothing can destroy! / Come! With your radiant eyes! –with your threats of thunder!