Billy Collins, "American Sonnet" | Wordsworth | Nemerov

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Billy Collins의 "American Sonnet"를 얼마 전 동네 도서관 라운지 서가의, 지금 이름은 기억 안 나는, 한 시집에서, 첫 연에서부터 끌려, 사진에 담아왔다. 오늘 생각이 나서 온라인에서 찾아보니 이 시를 소개하는 비디오가 있다:

 

Michael Ullyot 비디오: Billy Collins, "American Sonnet"

 

비디오에도 나오니 시 전문을 여기 올려도 되겠다.

 

 

American Sonnet  / Billy Collins

 

 

We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spencer

and it is not fourteen lines

like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

 

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,

that forces us to sing our songs in a little rooms

or pour our sentiments into measureing cups.

 

We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,

adding to the view a caption as conventional

as an Elizabethan womwn's heliocentric eyes.

 

We locate an adjective for the weather.

We announce that we are having a wonderful time.

We express the wish that you were here

 

and hide the wish that we were where you are,

walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered

as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

 

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,

a pizza or carved spires of a cathedral

will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

 

and you will toss on the table this reversible display

a few square inches of where we have strayed

and a compression of what we feel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"American Sonnet"를 읽으니, 며칠 전 The Writer's Almanac (내 블로그 '링크')에서 읽은, Wordsworth의 시가 생각난다:

 

"Upon Westminster Bridge"

by William Wordsworth

 

    Never did sun more beautifully steep

    In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill

    Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

    --- "Upon Westminster Bridge"에서

 

 

Wordsworth의 시를 다시 읽어보려고 The Writer's Almanac에 들어가서는 Howard Nemerov 의 시 "Going Away" 도 읽고 나온다. 그 한 구절이 따라 나온다:

 

    We have had kindness here, and some

    unkindness; now we are going on.