‘Как бронзовой золой жаровень’ (‘The sleepy garden scatters beetles’) by Boris Pasternak

The sleepy garden scatters beetles
Like bronze cinders from braziers.
Level with me and with my candle
There hangs a flowering universe.

As if into a new religion
I cross the threshold of this night,
Where the grey decaying poplar
Has veiled the moon's bright edge from sight,

Where the orchard surf whispers of apples,
Where the pond is an opened secret,
Where the garden hangs, as if on piles,
And holds the sky in front of it.


by Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к
(Boris Leonidovich Pasternak)
(1912 or 1913 depending on which source is cited)
translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France

Below is a recital of the poem in it’s original Russian:

Recital of the poem in Russian

Below is the poem in it’s original Russian cyrillic form:

Как бронзовой золой жаровень,
Жуками сыплет сонный сад.
Со мной, с моей свечою вровень
Миры расцветшие висят.

И, как в неслыханную веру,
Я в эту ночь перехожу,
Где тополь обветшало-серый
Завесил лунную межу.

Где пруд - как явленная тайна,
Где шепчет яблони прибой,
Где сад висит постройкой свайной
И держит небо пред собой.

Landscapes I. New Hampshire by T. S. Eliot

Children’s voices in the orchard

Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:

Golden head, crimson head.

Between the green tip and the root.

Black wing, brown wing, hover over;

Today grieves, tomorrow grieves,

Cover me over, light-in-leaves;

Golden head, black wing,

Cling, swing,

Spring, sing,

Swing up into the apple-tree.

 

by T. S. Eliot

from Minor Poems

Home-Thoughts, From Abroad by Robert Browning

Oh, to be in England

Now that April’s there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England – now!

 

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows –

Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children’s dower,

-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

 

by Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)