Antonín Sova

“ Beings remoulding their birth in creation. . .
And roaring from the city cess-pool, it carried
The first poisoned corpses in a greenish slime
It carried them forth, roaring a burial requiem
To torrid sands of days without hope. . . ”

“ Until into our hearts the same Tempest had wafted unending snowdrifts.
We heard not Yule-tide chimes, nor herdsmen's ditties,
Nor knew that He had been born who might redeem us ...
We found us again in a single yearning: to grow dead one to another,
Unending snowdrifts in our souls and unending night-times,
To clasp hands with final embrace of those long ago sundered
And never to hearken again to brutes of passion that panted within us. ”

“ Whereby we thrust our culture on a booth,
God's pity, is unended, still unended:
In it is lacking still thy final outcry
Of one, who in the treachery of darkness
Is grappling with his dreadful malady
And cravingly he snatches at achievement,
Snatches at moments in his soundless void,
Snatches at light in his dismantled brain,
And gropes for cadences, but on a sudden,
They slink away like sullen, sneering lackeys,
Pillage the palace, setting it aflame,
Abandon it and leave their master crazed
And in a fearful bankruptcy of mind
Stretched headlong in some room upon the floor. . . ”

“ It is enkindled not by sorrow of us, nor of all humanity;
Therein is not the purity that perishes for its faith;
Therein is not the passion wherewith the martyr of Constance [1] was ablaze;
And therefore, brutish dotard,
Grown hoary in the service of your baneful Imperium,
From whose relentless wisdom are hidden the mysteries of maltreated spirits,
What avail you now your lore and your revered gray hairs? ”

“ Your sorry wisdom has conceived not the light of righteousness,
Nor the gladness of youthful nations in their own destining;
Has conceived not that an ancient culture durst not enslave,
Would it warm and illumine,
And not be but a chafing and burdensome
Monstrous millstone about the neck of a galley-slave! ”

“ Where newly-moulded cannon are upreared,
Where in havens of war dusky vessels tower aloft?. . .
O, long since was the son of motion witness:
That Europe doth passionately embrace
Only those, who in sooth are alive. ”

“ Soldered the spare birches to their ground-plots
And osiered fields in the twilit hazes.
O, was it fain to set the glorious vaultage of heaven
And all creation glittering in warm tranquility,
The song of the stars chanted to the Unknown. ”

“ Is the desert of Europe with artless beauty. . .
The grass withers, that her bondsmen
May be bedded the softer
In days and in nights of hunger. . .
How rich here the waxing of pine-woods:
There is need of coffins for all the people. . . ”