Peter Bird - Three sonnets of Longfellow - текст песни (слова)

1. Mezzo cammin
 Half my life is gone, and I have let
 the years slip from me and have not fulfilled
 the aspiration of my youth: to build
 some tower of song with lofty parapet.
 Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
 of restless passions that would not be stilled,
 but sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
 kept me from what I may accomplish yet.
 Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
 lying beneath me with its sounds and sights ...
 -A city in the twilight dim and vast,
 with smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights-
 and hear above me on the autumnal blast
 the cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.
 
 2. The sound of the sea
 The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
 and round the pebbly beaches far and wide
 I heard the first wave of the rising tide
 rush onward with uninterrupted sweep:
 A voice out of the silence of the deep,
 a sound mysteriously multiplied
 as of a cataract from the mountain's side,
 or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
 So comes to us, at times, from the unknown
 and inaccessible solitudes of being,
 the rushing of the sea-tides of the soul.
 And inspirations that we deem our own
 are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
 of things beyond our reason or control.
 
 3. The poets
 O ye dead Poets who are living still,
 immortal in your verse, though life be fled;
 and ye, O living Poets, who are dead
 though ye are living, if neglect can kill:
 Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill,
 with drops of anguish falling fast and red
 from the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,
 ye were not glad your errand to fulfil?
 Yes; for the gift and ministry of Song
 have something in them so divinely sweet,
 it can assuage the bitterness of wrong.
 Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
 not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
 but in ourselves are triumph and defeat.