The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Эмили Дикинсон

BECLOUDED.

       The sky is low, the clouds are mean,

       A travelling flake of snow

       Across a barn or through a rut

       Debates if it will go.

       A narrow wind complains all day

       How some one treated him;

       Nature, like us, is sometimes caught

       Without her diadem.

      XXX.

       THE HEMLOCK.

       I think the hemlock likes to stand

       Upon a marge of snow;

       It suits his own austerity,

       And satisfies an awe

       That men must slake in wilderness,

       Or in the desert cloy, —

       An instinct for the hoar, the bald,

       Lapland's necessity.

       The hemlock's nature thrives on cold;

       The gnash of northern winds

       Is sweetest nutriment to him,

       His best Norwegian wines.

       To satin races he is nought;

       But children on the Don

       Beneath his tabernacles play,

       And Dnieper wrestlers run.

      XXXI.

       There's a certain slant of light,

       On winter afternoons,

       That oppresses, like the weight

       Of cathedral tunes.

       Heavenly hurt it gives us;

       We can find no scar,

       But internal difference

       Where the meanings are.

       None may teach it anything,

       ' T is the seal, despair, —

       An imperial affliction

       Sent us of the air.

       When it comes, the landscape listens,

       Shadows hold their breath;

       When it goes, 't is like the distance

       On the look of death.