sexta-feira, 2 de janeiro de 2009

READ ROBERT GRAVES’ POEM: The legs

Quando escrevi a mini-biografia de Martin Seymour-Smith, precisava citar um trecho do poema de Robert Graves, The legs, mas não o encontrava na internet. Tive dificuldades para achá-lo. Agora que o tenho, eis o poema, com post em portenglish, com a licença dos dez leitores deste blog.


This poem is on those who put determination before the feelings, and make life a long walk. Some people live thus, as legs striding along and across all the roads and everywhere, without looking behind, no looking around to see their fellows, to see anyone, legs cutting down the head, hiding the reason in a very deep thought, and walking world without end.

In other hand (consider the pun), people who bring sense and sensibility together are not legs, only. And this poem is about them as well. They resemble the poet, who’d rather be off road, “on grass by the roadside”. I don’t think it means watching life going by. It means being more cautious, and, at the same time, more human, entirely human, with reason and emotions working together, like the second part of the poem, as it follows:


The Legs (by Rober Graves)


There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.

And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.

And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.

What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.

Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.

My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,

Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.

Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.

My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down?

Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.

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