시인의 첫사랑 시 (3)

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Edward Hirsch

 

I was initiated into poetry trance on a rainy Saturday afternoon in mid October ... when I wandered down to the basement of our house to pick through some of my grandfather's forgotten books. i was eight years old .... I opened a musty anthology of poetry to a section called "Night" and read a poem that immediately arrested me.... I read it straight through, and its simple incremental rhythm seized me. I read it again slowly, pronouncing every word to myself, and suddenly I was in two places at once: I was standing next to a bookself in a small, one-windowed room in my parent's basement , and I was lost in the middle of a field somewhere in southern Latvia with a storm wildly brewing around me. I felt as though the words of the poem, like the storm itself, had cast a "tylent spell" upon me. I couldn't move.... I read the forst stanza and felt the dusk purpling around me, an icy wind blowing out of control, invisible hands holding me by the shoulders. I said, "And I cannot, cannot go," The repetitive stresses were like two blows to my chest.

 

 

      The Night Is Darkening Round Me

      By Emily Brontë

 

      The night is darkening  round me,

      The wild winds coldly blow;

      But a tyrant spell has bound me

      And I cannot cannot go.

 

      The giant trees are bending,

      Their bare boughs weighed with snow;

      And the storms fast descending,

      And yet I cannot go.

 

      Clouds beyond clouds above me,

      Wastes beyond wastes below;

      But nothing drear can move me,

      I will not cannot go.