Child’s Play

  • I know a merry thicket
  • It was never spoilt by man’s care,
  • Tis a glad mad thicket
  • For no raked smooth paths are there
  • But thorn bushes wind all about
  • Thick with blackberries big sweet
  • Ground briars that literally shout
  • Soft moss all round my feet.

  • Also some four-footed things
  • A sleek rabbit neath a stump,
  • Also some things with wings
  • They nest in a hazel clump.
  • Not all there’s a coot in a bank
  • Covered with grass that’s rank,
  • Once a wood guest in a fir tree
  • Who would sit and blink and wink
  • Never stirred from his nest for me
  • Was too brave got shot I think.
  • Often I lie there on the moss and kick my heels
  • Dream and make believe
  • I am a trapper, I will tell you how it feels
  • Common things to leave:
  • I think and at once a trapper am
  • Then common things look strange

  • That tree stump becomes a wigwam
  • Red men the forest range,
  • Now I am called the white bear
  • For every one has a fine mane there,
  • Something wriggles to that bush near
  • You say a lizard I say a deer,
  • That noise the rustle of a meadow through the trees
  • No I say a prairie rolling in the fresh breeze,
  • Far beyond are the rocky mountains blue
  • And—but you laugh, I will tell no more to you.

儿戏

  • 我知道一处快活林，
  • 从未遭人类烦扰败坏，
  • 那是个疯狂快活林，
  • 没有整修的坦途存在，
  • 只有荆棘到处蜿蜒，
  • 长满又大又甜的黑莓、
  • 真会呼号的铺地石楠、
  • 我脚边围绕的柔软青苔。

  • 还有一些四脚的生物，
  • 树桩下毛皮光滑的兔子，
  • 还有一些长翅膀的生物，
  • 它们巢居在榛树丛里。
  • 茂密青草覆盖的岸堤
  • 里面根本没有白顶鸡，
  • 曾是栖身枞树林中客，
  • 常蹲着眼睛直眨巴眨巴，
  • 从来不为我动弹挪窝，
  • 太勇敢我想是遭了枪打。
  • 我常常躺在那里的苔藓上无所事事，
  • 梦想并且假装
  • 我是个猎户。我要告诉你远离俗世
  • 感觉究竟怎样：
  • 我一想就立时变成猎户，
  • 寻常物看起来好异常：

  • 树桩变成了一座棚屋，
  • 红人在森林里游荡；
  • 现在我人称白熊，
  • 因那里人人都有细鬃；
  • 朝附近那树丛蠕动之物，
  • 你说是蜥蜴我说是麋鹿；
  • 那噪声是一块草地的飒飒声穿过林间，
  • 不，我说是清风中滚动的一片草原；
  • 远处是落基山脉的蓝色，
  • 还有——可是你大笑，我就不跟你多说了。

傅浩　译

附

Tis: It is.

neath: beneath.

rank: luxuriantly or excessively vigorous in growth.

维护者注——

红人：指北美洲的印第安人。

叶芝诗集（增订本） 2018 ——

This appears to be one of the earliest poems in the album and marks an important phase in Yeats’s youthful poetic development. He recalled it with typically wayward spelling in a letter of 1889 to his friend the Irish poet Katharine Tynan:

My ideas of a poem have greatly changed since I wrote the Island. Oisin is an incident or series of incidents[,] the “Island of Statues” a region. There is a thicket between three roads, some distance from any of them, in the midst of Howth. I used to spend a great deal of time in that small thicket when at Howth. The other day I turned up a poem in broken metre written long ago about it. That thicket gave me my first thought of what a long poem should be, I thought of it as a region into which one should wander from the cares of life. The charecters[sic] were to be no more real than the shadows that people the Howth thicket. There[sic] mission was to lesson[sic] the solitude without destroying its peace. (CLI 135)

trapper: The passage about the trapper may recall the lines about the “old hunter talking with gods” from Browning’s early poem Pauline. There Browning treated two subjects that also obsessed Yeats, his reading and his relation to Shelley. Yeats alluded to the Browning passage throughout his career, most memorably in the late poem “Are You Content.”

rocky mountains: I have left “rocky mountains” in lower case as a general reference, but Yeats may have intended more specifically the Rocky Mountains in the American West.

George Bornstein—