Шекспир. Сонет 64. Океан и суша

Я видел, как Длань Времени смела
во прах богатсво гордости эпохи,
возвышенные башни разнесла,
там в рабстве медь, где ярости жестоки.
Когда я зрел: голодный океан
над берегом царем превозносился,
То, побеждая над водой, земля
В волнах бывала вынуждена скрыться.
Когда я видел статус и распад,
и это в состояньях измененье,
Руины научили рассуждать,
что и любовь моя догонит тленье.
И эта мысль, как смерть, не выбирает.
Но плачет лишь о том, что потеряет.

SONNET 64
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
 The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
 When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
 And brass eternal, slave to mortal rage;
 When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
 Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
 And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
 Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
 When I have seen such interchange of state,
 Or state itself confounded to decay;
 Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate --
 That Time will come and take my love away.
    This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
    But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

NOTES

 LXIV. The melancholy train of thought which commenced with lix. still continues. All things are mutable, and in a constant state of flux and reflux. From the dominion of Time, Change, and Decay none can hope to escape; a thought which touches the poet with sadness, when he thinks of his friend.

 2. The sumptuous buildings or other appurtenances of a generation or a people which has decayed and passed away, and which is now buried in the dust.

 4. Mortal rage. Deadly, destroying. "Mortal rage" refers to the supreme principle of Mutability and Decay.


 5-8. The words of K. Hen. IV., Part II., Act iii. sc. i, lines 45-51, have been justly compared:
"O God, that one might read the book of fate,
 And see the revolution of the times
 Make mountains level, and the continent,
 Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
 Into the sea! and other times, to see
 The beachy girdle of the ocean
 Too wide for Neptune's hips," &c.
The following lines from Tennyson's In Memoriam, written, probably, to some extent, under Shakespearean influence, may also be given:
"There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
 O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
 There where the long street roars hath been
 The stillness of the central sea.

 The hills are shadows, and they flow
 From form to form, and nothing stands;
 They melt like mist, the solid lands,
 Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
8. Extending its own domain by what the other loses, and losing by what the other gains.

 10. State. Magnificence, though in the previous line "state" seems to mean "condition."

 13. This thought is as a death. Causing anticipatively the pang of separation.