Reader Of Books Poem by Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov

My dear friend, and I have tried to find
My paradise in serfdom of a soul,
I liked them all - the odd ways of a mind
Without hopes, or memories, or goals.

Promptly to glide along the brooks of lines,
To enter into straits of chapters, slow,
To watch a foam on the flows' spines,
And listen to a tide's increasing roar!

But at the night, oh, how fast they gloom -
The shades behind the images and drawers,
The pendulum, immobile, like the moon,
That o'er the glimm'ring quagmire hovers!


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, May, 2000