Desde la Niebla – Eden Phillpotts
Aunque es más conocido por sus novelas policiales, Eden Phillpotts fue también un excelente poeta. El siguiente fragmento, prosa y verso, pertenece a su relato “The Girl and the Faun”. Destacamos la belleza y verdad de la penúltima estrofa.
Pan is the most approachable of all the high gods. One need only call upon his name with reverence and the Universal will respond. It is necessary, however, that you should be in perfect harmony with earth. As Spring said to the dryad, you must cultivate your cosmic sympathies, or Pan will not attend to you.But if your spirit is prepared, then in some sortyour petition will be answered and one of his myriad voices will fall upon your ear. It may be the sound of the wind in the hair of an ancient forest;or it may be in the tinkle of dry, dead leaves, the sigh of dead heather and the tap of falling acorns at autumn time; it may be in the lift and lull of river music afar off, or the murmur of waterfalls, ;it may be in the distant cry of birds that fly by night, or the booming of bitterns, or laughter of woodpeckers, or hooting of owls. Pan may speak in the voices of waves, when their crystal scythes flash over the sand and mow dead shells on lonely shores;or he may bell on the cliff and the precipice, where wind strikes stone and turns a mountain into a harp. Or you shall hear him in the glimmering leas of summer, where a million wings glint over the flowersand the insects drone together. To-day he will let a croaking frog make his answer; tomorrow he will whisper with the voice of the rain.
Coix, knowing these things, went to a high place and sat down where a pine dwelt on the side of a precipice and thrust itself dizzily into the air. It was a most sequestered spot, and nothing but a rather reckless faun, or a moonbeam, or a creature with wings, could have reached it. But he scrambled hither and sat astride on the pine; and at about half-past one cried out to Pan.
His emotion rendered him slightly incoherent; indeed he wept as he spoke, and the fine phrases that he had composed all failed him; but he made it clear that he loved and lived for a girl by the name of Iole, and that she cared nothing for him, but proposed to wed a slight, worthless sylvan boy called Glaucus. As a fact the wedding would take place on the following morning if nothing happened to prevent it; and Coix therefore humbly implored his dear father to turn him into a man as quickly as possible, in order that he might win the maiden, even at the coast of its own immortal existence.
Pan heard his satyr son, and answered as consideratly and carefully as though Coix had been the most important person, with the most important problem, in the world. Because there is not one Pan for the rich and another Pan for the poor, as happens with many great gods, but just one, only Pan for everything and everybody, to whom the snail on his grass blade and the monarch on his throneare equally significant people with precisely similar claims upon his judgment and his wisdom. This indicates a divine sense of perspective on his part, beyond the power of snail, or sovereign.
The god happened to be in a genial mood and Coix dried his yellow eyes and listened.
Thus Pan:
“A starling with the plovers flew
And chose a plover for his mate;
He thought himself a plover too,
And dreamed a crest upon his pate.
But when poor speckly thought to wed,
The angry peewits laid him dead.
Oh, thou immortal, prick-eared fool,
That kind with kind should ever blend
Doth Alma Venus make her rule
For mortal things that have an end.
Go, join the nymphs: they’ll heed your cry;
Think not on sad humanity.
A mystery mankind doth reign
Above the fleeting earthborn host.
Poor toys of care and chance and pain,
Yet in their fiery hearts they boast
Not Life, nor Time, nor Death can kill,
Their huge inconquerable will.
Of iron circumstance the slave,
Prey to the blood in their own bone,
Their crown the dust, their goal the grave,
The reason of them all unknown,
They follow still with fierce delight
One short, red road from night to night.
And while they babble of free will,
Within the houses where they dwell,
Their destiny the fates distil
From the deep founts of heaven and hell.
The only conscious things that die,
They flout their own mortality.
There is a tiger hid in men,
And still their savage hearts are glad
When fury bares the fang and when
The crooked claws are loosed from pad.
Where Peace hath from their councils fled,
Returns she only through the dead.
Their principalities and powers,
That follow where the tiger plays,
Plunder the children’s gift of hours,
Pilfer the children’s gift of days,
Devour the children’s heritage
From bloody age to bloody age.
They know it, and themselves they scorn,
Seeing themselves they cannot trust.
They know the wide-wayed heavens morn;
They know their treasure’s of the dust;
They know that Reason’s crystal light
Is still but darkness in their sight.
Life’s labyrinth they have explored,
And hung with many a doubtful clue
Flashed from their might, struck from their sword;
And some they treasure still for true.
One steadfast, immemorial chain
They held awhile, then lost again.
A thread from their own spirit spun,
Forgot through age on weary age –
The master thread, the only one
To guide their fearful pilgrimage,
And gleam again when dayspring shows
That Man to men most holy grows.
For when the linking of their hands
In one invulnerable love
Weaves a wide cincture round all lands,
No bolt from the eternal Jove
Shall rend it, nor the gods outvie
Mankind in might and majesty.
By Reason – in her sacred name
It shall be sung, how in her wings
They came and fought and overcame
The force of all created things.
Time’s ancient self knows not to quell
The ramparts of that citadel.
A human maid’s more precious far,
In her sublime mortality
Than faun, or nymph, or evening star
Or moon upon the midnight sea.
Earth thrills to nothing half so sweet
As the caress of her young feet.
Such as art thou, may altars build
And pay her humble reverence,
Until, her destiny fulfilled,
Like a dead flower she goeth hence.
Worship, do homage and adore,
But never dare to love her more.
Pan ceased, and the night was still.
Selección: Diego Ruggeri “Árbol”
librosdelarbol@yahoo.com.ar
Fecha de creación : 05/23/2008 @ 05:20
Última modificación : 06/27/2008 @ 03:23
Categoría : Poesía – Desde la Niebla
Página leida 940 veces
Desde la niebla eden phillpotts.. Awesome