W. B. Yeats - Colonus' Praise 汉译

(From 'Oedipus at Colonus')

Chorus.

Come praise Colonus' horses, and come praise

The wine-dark of the wood's intricacies,

The nightingale that deafens daylight there,

If daylight ever visit where,

Unvisited by tempest or by sun,

Immortal ladies tread the ground

Dizzy with harmonious sound,

Semele's lad a gay companion.

And yonder in the gymnasts' garden thrives

The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives

Athenian intellect its mastery,

Even the grey-leaved olive-tree

Miracle-bred out of the living stone;

Nor accident of peace nor war

Shall wither that old marvel, for

The great grey-eyed Athena stares thereon.

Who comes into this country, and has come

Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,

Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter

And beauty-drunken by the water

Glittering among grey-leaved olive-trees,

Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;

Who finds abounding Cephisus

Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.

Because this country has a pious mind

And so remembers that when all mankind

But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,

Poseidon gave it bit and oar,

Every Colonus lad or lass discourses

Of that oar and of that bit;

Summer and winter, day and night,

Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.