Robert Frost - The Subverted Flower 汉译

She drew back; he was calm:

“It is this that had the power.”

And he lashed his open palm

With the tender-headed flower.

He smiled for her to smile,

But she was either blind

Or willfully unkind.

He eyed her for a while

For a woman and a puzzle.

He flicked and flung the flower,

And another sort of smile

Caught up like fingertips

The corners of his lips

And cracked his ragged muzzle.

She was standing to the waist

In golden rod and brake,

Her shining hair displaced.

He stretched her either arm

As if she made it ache

To clasp her - not to harm;

As if he could not spare

To touch her neck and hair.

“If this has come to us

And not to me alone -”

So she thought she heard him say;

Though with every word he spoke

His lips were sucked and blown

And the effort made him choke

Like a tiger at a bone.

She had to lean away.

She dared not stir a foot,

Lest movement should provoke

The demon of pursuit

That slumbers in a brute.

It was then her mother抯 call

From inside the garden wall

Made her steal a look of fear

To see if he could hear

And would pounce to end it all

Before her mother came.

She looked and saw the shame:

A hand hung like a paw,

An arm worked like a saw

As if to be persuasive,

An ingratiating laugh

That cut the snout in half,

And eye become evasive.

A girl could only see

That a flower had marred a man,

But what she could not see

Was that the flower might be

Other than base and fetid:

That the flower had done but part,

And what the flower began

Her own too meager heart

Had terribly completed.

She looked and saw the worst.

And the dog or what it was,

Obeying bestial laws,

A coward save at night,

Turned from the place and ran.

She heard him stumble first

And use his hands in flight.

She heard him bark outright.

And oh, for one so young

The bitter words she spit

Like some tenacious bit

That will not leave the tongue.

She plucked her lips for it,

And still the horror clung.

Her mother wiped the foam

From her chin, picked up her comb,

And drew her backward home.