COLLECTED POETRY Paul Valery

COLLECTED POETRY Paul Valèry

Translated and with a preface by Charles Stewart

1

PREFACE

The mere facts of Valéry’s life, like the mere facts of our own, need not be dwelt upon here. That is the task of the biographer. The banalities of daily existence, even of great artists, have little to do with the works of art. The ‘facts’ of the life of Valéry’s mind, however, his poetic mind, require perhaps more explication if the poems are to be fully appreciated. And a few dates.

Born 30th October, 1871, Valéry’s early poems date from 1887, when he was sixteen. There are more than sixty, written over the next five years, many published in small periodicals. Then, in 1892, at the age of twenty-one, he renounced poetry, in order to concentrate the more upon scientifically provable subjects. He did not take up poetry again, or so the legend goes, (a legend he did little to discourage), until 1912, when, at the age of forty-one, he was asked by Gide to put together a small volume of his early verse for publication, a request to which he reluctantly agreed, insisting first on revising the poems he wished to preserve and writing a short new poem, of some thirty or forty lines, by way of introduction. This ‘introduction’ grew, over the next few years, ‘like an hydra infinitely expandable, a monster blown up by the leisure of my uselessness during the war’, as he himself put it, into ‘La Jeune Parque’. Published in 1917, it was seen then as Valéry’s triumphant return to poetry. In a burst of creativity, he wrote all the poems of ‘Charmes’ over the next four or five years. And that was it.

Or so the legend goes. In fact, Valéry never wholly abandoned poetry. Many of the poems in the ‘Album de vers anciens’ were written during those twenty years of ‘silence’. Much of ‘Charmes’ was written while he was working on ‘La Jeune Parque’.

And as the ‘Pièces diverses de toute époque’ show, ‘Charmes’ was not the end. It is perhaps more helpful to see the poetic ‘oeuvre’ as a whole, as a kind of poetic symphony, with the ‘Album de vers anciens’ as the first movement stating in embryo all the ‘motives’ which are to come, ‘La Jeune Parque’ as the gigantic central slow movement, ‘Charmes’ as the grand climax, the mature summation of the work, and the ‘Pièces diverses de toute époque’ as a coda, a kind of scherzo, placed at the end, harking back to various themes heard during the other movements, Seen thus, ‘Palme’ is a fitting climax to the work, and ‘Le Philosophe et La Jeune Parque’ an unexpectedly amusing and amusingly unexpected ‘Envoi’.

Finally, my not entirely arbitrary ‘choice’.

2

I pondered long about the early poems, written by the adolescent Valéry; even longer about the twelve poems found among his papers and published fourteen years after his death. But I was incessantly brought back to Valéry’s own refusal to write a preface for an unpublished early version of Mallarmé’s ‘L'Après-Midi d’un faune’, found among Chausson’s papers in 1920, calling it ‘a sort of impiety’. Does not the omission of these early poems from those he painstakingly revised and included in the ‘Album de vers anciens’ in 1920, and the exclusion of all but four of the poems published in ‘Mélange’ in 1939 from the ‘Pièces diverses de toute époque’, issued first in 1942, point rather to the poems which he wished to preserve? I have therefore translated all the poems Valéry published in the various editions of his ‘Poésies’ in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, up to and including the edition of 1941. In 1942 a new edition appeared, augmented by the ‘Pièces diverses de toute époque’, which I have included, and by the three libretti, ‘Amphion’, ‘Semiramis’ and ‘Cantate du Narcisse’, written during the nineteen-thirties, the first two for Arthur Honegger, the last for Germaine Tailleferre, which I have not. These three ‘performance’ works are all expanded versions of earlier poems and do not seem to me to stand on their own without the music for which they were conceived.

I have also translated, as Appendix I, the later version of two poems from the ‘Album de vers anciens’, ‘Les vaines danseuses’ and ‘Été’, both of which Valéry somewhat oddly rewrote, and in the latter case considerably expanded, for the 1942 edition of ‘Poésies’. Also ‘Petites choses’: ‘Au-dessous d'un portrait’, ‘Sur un éventail’ and ‘À Juan Ramon Jimenez’, three occasional pieces.

And, as Appendix II, I have thrown all theory and caution to the wind and included three ‘pieces’ which I love: ‘Pour votre Hêtre «Suprême»’, not published in ‘Poésies’ but in Volume C of the ‘Oeuvres’ in 1933, written on November 2nd, the Day of the Dead, 1917, in the darkest days of World War I, after a stay at Cuverville, the home of André and Madeleine Gide, and dedicated to her, to celebrate the beautiful Beech-tree on her property to which he came, as he wrote, ‘barefooted to make my devotions’, but a poem which, as he also wrote to Gide, had, despite his intentions, ‘become serious, almost a lamentation’; ‘Ultima Verba’, published in Carrefour on May 12th, 1945, four days after VE Day; and ‘L’Ange’, begun in 1922 but only finished on May 21st, 1945, and read on that day to his friend, Prince Pierre of Monaco, just before Valéry took to his bed for the last time. Published by the Nouvelle Review Française the following year, it is his last completed work and in many ways his last testament.

As for the rest, the poems speak for themselves.

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CONTENTS

ALBUM DE VERS ANCIENS

La fileuse.

The girl who spins.

6

Hélène.

Helen.

7

Orphée.

Orpheus.

8

Naissance de Vénus.

Birth of Venus.

9

Féerie.

Enchantment.

10

Même féerie.

A like enchantment.

11

Baignée.

Bathing.

12

Au bois dormant.

The Sleeping Beauty.

13

César.

Caesar.

14

Le bois amical.

The friendly wood.

15

Les vaines danseuses.

The vain dancers.

16

Un feu distinct ...

A distinct fire ...

17

Narcisse parle.

Narcissus speaks.

18

Épisode.

Episode.

20

Vue.

View.

21

Valvins.

Valvins.

22

Été.

Summer.

23

Profusion du soir, poème abandonné ...

Profusion of evening.

24

Anne.

Anne.

28

Air de Sémiramis.

Song of Semiramis.

30

L'amateur de poèmes.

The poetry lover.

34

LA JEUNE PARQUE

THE YOUNG FATE

​ ​35

4

CHARMES

​Deducere carmen.

Aurore.

Break of Day.

50

Au platane.

To a Plane-Tree.

53

Cantique des colonnes.

Canticle of the Columns.

56

L'abeille.

The Bee.

59

Poésie.

Poetry.

60

Les pas.

The Steps.

62

La ceinture.

The Belt.

63

La dormeuse.

The Sleeping Girl.

64

Fragments du Narcisse.

Fragments of Narcissus.

65

La Pythie.

The Prophetess.

76

Le sylphe.

The Sylph.

84

L'insinuant.

The Implication.

85

La fausse morte.

The Undead.

86

Ébauche d'un serpent.

Sketch of a Serpent.

87

Les grenades.

Pomegranates.

98

Le vin perdu.

The Lost Wine.

99

Intérieur.

Interior.

100

Le Cimetière marin.

The Cemetery by the Sea.

101

Ode secrète.

Secret Ode.

107

Le rameur.

The Oarsman.

108

Palme.

Palm.

109

5

PIÈCES DIVERSES DE TOUTE ÉPOQUE Neige.

Snow.

112

Sinistre.

Disaster.

113

Colloque (pour deux flûtes).

Colloque.

114

Le distraite.

The Distracted One.

116

Insinuant II.

The Insinuation II.

117

Heure.

Hour.

118

L'oiseau cruel...

The cruel bird…

119

À l'aurore…

At dawn…

120

Équinoxe.

Equinoxe.

121

La caresse.

The Caresse.

123

Chanson à part.

Song To Myself.

124

Le philosophe et ​la Jeune Parque. *

*

*

125

*

*

*

*

*

*

APPENDIX I Les vaines danseuses (1942)

The Vain Dancers (1942)

128

Été (1942)

Summer (1942)

129

Petites choses:

131

Au-dessous d'un portrait.

Sur un éventail. À Juan Ramon Jimenez.

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

APPENDIX II Pour votre hêtre «Suprême».

132

ULTIMA VERBA.

133

L'ANGE.

134

6

ALBUM DE VERS ANCIENS

THE GIRL WHO SPINS

The lilies..., neither do they spin.

SEATED, the young girl spins at the blue of the window Where all the melodious garden seems to doze; The ancient spinning-wheel hums its intoxication.

Weary, having drunk from the azure, of spinning The tender thread, with fingers feebly relaxing, She dreams, and her slender head of itself inclines.

A scrub and the pure air create a living source Which, suspended by the day, deliciously water With their loss of flowers the garden of idleness.

One lone stem, where the wandering wind has rested, Bows down in vain greeting to her glimmering grace, Disdained splendidly, by the old spinning-wheel, her rose.

But the sleeping girl spins the wool in isolation; Mysteriously the frail shadow weaves of itself With thread from those slim fingers which are sleeping, yet spin.

The dream itself thus unwinds with an idleness Angelic, and ceaseless, on soft credulous spindle, The undulating thread at the whim of the caress...

Behind so many flowers, the azure hides itself, Weaver of foliage and of encircling light: All the green sky is dying. The final tree still burns.

Your sister, the great rose wherein there smiles a saint, Perfumes your abstracted brow with the innocent wind Of her breath, and believes you languish... You are faded At the blue of the window where you spin the wool.

7

HELEN

BLUE SKY! it's me... I come from the caves of the dead To hear the sonorous sound of the waves breaking, And I see again the galleys at first dawning Revived from the shade on a thread of golden oars.

My hands alone can summon up the monarchs Whose salt-caked beards amused my pure fingers; I cried. They sang of their obscure triumphs And the gulfs which fled behind their departing ships.

I hear the deep-sounding conchs and the bugles Keeping in martial time with the sweep of the oars; The clear song of the rowers that bind the tumult, And the Gods, upon heroic prows exalted With their antique smiles which only the spray affronts, Reaching out to me their indulgent sculpted arms.

8

ORPHEUS

... I compose in the mind, under myrtles, Orpheus The Admirable!... The flame, of pure chaos descends; It changes the bare mountain to majestic trophy From where the act of a god rises up resounding.

If the god sings, he breaks the omnipotent site; The sun sees the horror of the movement of the stones; A moaning unprecedented calls up dazzlingly The high harmonious walls of a golden shrine.

He sings, on the brink of the splendid sky, Orpheus!

The rock moves, and stumbles; and each enchanted stone Feels in itself a new weight towards the frenzied blue!

A half-finished Temple evening bathes as it grows, Which gathers itself and orders itself in the gold For the boundless soul of the great hymn on the lyre!

9

BIRTH OF VENUS

FROM the depths of her mother, still cold and steaming, Here at a threshold beaten by tempests, the flesh Brought bitterly forth by the sun out of the sea, Sets itself free from the diamonds and the turmoil.

Her smile takes shape, and attends upon her white arms To bathe in tears the east on a mature shoulder, Of watery Thetis the most pure precious stones, And her tresses divide at a quiver of her flanks.

The cool pebbles, which sprinkle and flee her nimble run, Give way, hollow rumour of thirst, and the facile Sand has drunk the kisses of her childish bounding; But the thousand glances perfidious or vague, Her darting eye blends with the perilous flashes Of smiling water, and the faithless dance of the waves.

10

ENCHANTMENT

THE slender moon pours forth a sacred glimmer, All robed in a tissue of fine silver beams, Upon the marble bases where the Shadow dreams Her chariot of pearl an iridescent shimmer.

For the silken swans who lightly brush the reeds And forward faintly luminous as plumed ships nose, She gathers in infinity a snowy rose Whose petals dropping on the water circles breed...

Is this life?... O rapture of sensual desert sighs Where the feeble plash of silvery water dies, Its crystal echoes at a secret threshold spent...

Confused by roses soft then must the flesh commence To tremble, if a cry of fatal diamonds blent Cracks with the close of day all the fable immense.

11

A LIKE ENCHANTMENT

THE slender moon pours forth a sacred glimmer, Robed as in a tissue of fine silver beams, Upon the marble masses where pensive there dreams Some virgin all a pearl-like iridescent shimmer.

For the silken swans who lightly brush the reeds And forward faintly luminous as plumed ships nose, Her hand plucks and apportions out a snowy rose Whose petals dropping on the water circles breed.

Delicious desert place, rapture of lonely sighs, Where moonstruck silvery water ebbs and dies Keeping of its crystal echoes infinite account, What heart decayed can bear the unrelenting charm Of the dazzling night and the fatal firmament, Without its pure cry become a weapon drawn?

12

BATHING

A fruit of the flesh is bathing in some fresh fountain, (Blue in the trembling gardens) but out of the water, Set apart from the coiled hair's powerful helmet, Gleams the golden head which cuts at the nape a tomb.

Beauty has budded out of the rose and the pin!

Coming from the same mirror where her jewels are drenched, Bizarre fires break forth whose hard bouquet lashes The ear given up to the mild waves' naked words.

A vague arm trailing in the limpid nothingness The image of a flower vainly to gather Grows tenuous, ripples, asleep in empty delight, While the other, bent pure beneath the firmament, Among the immense waves of hair which it moistens, Captures in the simple gold an insect's drunken flight.

13

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

THE princess, in a palace as pure as roses, Beneath the murmurs, beneath the moving shadow sleeps, And in coral sketches out an obscure language When the wandering birds peck at her golden rings.

She hears nothing either of the drops, in their falls, Chiming with the treasure of a far off empty age, Nor, from the vague forest, a wind carrying flutes Piercing as the rumour of a phrase on the horn.

Left there, for so long, the echo lulls as it revives, O softness ever equal to the looping vine Which sways above and beats upon your buried eyes.

So close to your cheek and so lingering the rose Does not serve to dissipate the delight of folds Secretly sensitive to the sunbeam settled there.

14

CAESAR

CAESAR, calm Caesar, the foot upon everything, Hard fingers in the beard, the dark eye populating With eagles and with battles the contemplated west, Your heart is proud, and you sense an all-powerful Cause.

Lake waters beat in vain and lap your rosy bed; In vain the precious gold shines down on the young wheat; You harden in the knots of your assembled body The order, which at the last will cleave your closed mouth.

The ample world, beyond the immense horizon, The Empire awaits the decree, the flash, the brand Which will change the evening into a raging dawn.

Happy there on the waters, and cradled by chance, An idle fisherman who drifts and sings, not knowing What gathering thunderbolt is centred on Caesar.

15

THE FRIENDLY WOOD

WE have thought only of pure things Side by side, on untrodden paths, Each of us felt for the other's hand Speechless... among hidden flowers; We walked together as if betrothed Alone, in the meadow's green night; We portioned out enchantment's fruits The friendly moon of the insane And then, we were dead upon the moss, Far off, alone in the shadow's soft Of this private and murmurous wood; And on high, in the light immense, We found that we were both in tears O my dear companion of silence!

16

THE VAIN DANCERS

THESE that are like to the lightest flowers are come, Figurines of gold and beauties all so slender Made iridescent by a feeble moon ... They are here Melodiously gliding through the lightened wood.

Of mallows and irises and nocturnal roses Are the graces of night in their budding dances.

How veiled perfumes are bestowed by their fingers of gold!

But the mild sky plucks at petals in this dead grove And the feeble water scarcely glimmers, is resting Like a pale treasure wet with the dew of long ago Where the flowering silence mounts ... Again they are here Melodiously gliding through the lightened wood.

To beloved calyxes their hands are full of grace; A little moonlight sleeps upon their pious lips And their wonderful arms with such gestures beguiled Love loosely to let fall beneath friendly myrtles Their feral bonds and their caresses ... But certain ones, Less captives of the rhythm and the distant harps, Will go with subtle step towards the burying lake To drink frail lily water where pure oblivion sleeps.

17

A DISTINCT FIRE ...

A distinct fire lives in me, and I view coldly The violence of life illuminated whole...

I no longer love then as only in abeyance Even its gracious acts compounded of the light.

My days become a night which answers look for look, After the first few hours of unhappy sleep; When misery itself is scattered with the darkness It returns to live in me, and I see nothing else.

Then if joy is shattered, an echo alerts me Not to reject the death even of my mortal flesh, And with my strange laughter still sounding in my ear, As in an empty shell the murmur of the sea, The doubt, - upon the brink of an extreme marvel, If I am, if I was, if I sleep or if I wake?

18

NARCISSUS SPEAKS

​Narcissae placandis manibus.

O BROTHERS! sad lilies, I languish with beauty For desiring myself in your fair nudity, And towards you, Nymph, Nymph, O Nymph of the fountains, I come to offer pure silence my vain tears.

A great calm attends me, where I listen for hope.

The waters' voice changes and speaks of the evening; I hear silver grass grow in the holy shadow, And the deceitful moon elevates her mirror Even to the secrets of the dried up fountain.

And me! Having plunged wholeheartedly in the reeds, I languish, O sapphire, for my sad beauty!

I know no more love but for magical waters Where I forget the laughter and the ancient rose.

How I lament your fatal and pure splendour, O fountain so languidly by me surrounded, Where my eyes have drawn up from a mortal azure My image with a wreath of humid flowers crowned!

Alas! The image is vain and the tears eternal!

Over the bluish woods with their brotherly arms, An ambiguous hour's tender glow exists, And the last of the day forms for me a bridegroom Nude, on the pale place where the sad water lures...

Delicious demon, desirable and icy!

Here in the water my flesh is moonlight and dew, O form obedient and opposite my eyes!

Here are my silver arms with their pure gestures!...

My lingering hands in lovely gold grow weary Of calling this captive whom the leaves interlace, And I cry to the echoes the names of dark gods!...

19

Farewell, reflection lost on the calm enclosed wave, Narcissus... the very name a tender perfume For the soft heart. Scatter for the shades of the dead The funerary rose upon this empty tomb.

Be then, my lip, the rose distributing the kiss Which makes a dear spectre gradually appeased, For the night speaks softly, nearby and faraway, To calyxes full of shade and of light slumbers.

But the moon is at play with recumbent myrtles.

I adore you, under these myrtles, O doubtful Flesh sorrowfully budding for the solitude And mirrored by the mirror sleeping in the wood.

I free myself in vain from your gentle presence, The false hour slackens our members on the moss And with a sombre delight swells the profound wind.

Farewell, Narcissus... Die! The twilight has arrived.

At the sigh of my heart my appearance trembles, The flute, buried deep in the azure modulates Regretfully for sonorous flocks departing.

But on the mortal cold wherein the star is lit, Before a slow tomb is formed of nothing but mist, Take this kiss which breaks the calm of fatal water!

Hope alone may suffice to shatter this crystal.

The ripple ravishes me from my exile's breath So that my breath can animate a slender flute Whose nimble player may to me be indulgent!...

Fade vanishing away, perturbed divinity!

And, you, pour out to the moon, humble lonely flute, The whole diversity of our tears of silver.

20

EPISODE

ON an evening sublimely favoured by the doves, A maiden is gently combing her hair in the sun.

She bestows on the floating waterlilies a toe's Final touch, and to warm her cold wandering hands Sometimes bathes at sunset their transparent roses.

Shortly, as if by an innocent shower, her skin Trembles, it is the absurd voice of a reed-pipe, Flute whose perpetrator with teeth of precious gems Calls up a futile wind of shadow and reverie By the hidden kiss he risks under the flowers.

But almost indifferent to the ruse of these tears, Or to her deification by any word Of the rose, she combs from her hair a heavy halo; And pulling at her nape a pleasure twisted there, Her delicious fists quicken the cluster of gold From whence light flows down between her limpid fingers! ... A petal dies upon the dampness of her shoulder, A drop descends from the flute into the water, And the pure foot takes fright like a lovely bird Drunken on shadow ...

21

VIEW

IF the beach is inclined, if Shade wears out the eye and weeps When the sky is tearful, so From salt of pure teeth rises The virgin haze where the air Is cradled by then exhaled From the sheer wave of a sea Made dull in its influence One who not able to hear When the lip moves in the wind Makes light of dissipating A thousand vain words become Under the moist flash of teeth The softest flame from within.

22

VALVINS

IF you want to resolve the forest that cools you Happy, you yourself merged with the leaves, if you stay In the sweep of the skiff at all times literary, Trailing a few ardently situated suns Upon the whiteness of its flank which the Seine strokes Tender, or foreseeing the afternoon has sung, Even as the great wood is drenching a long tress, And blending your sail with the best of the summer.

But always close to you whom the silence bequeaths The gathering cries of all the naked heavens, The shadow of some page scattered not from any book Trembles, reflection of the wandering sail upon The powdery surface-skin of the green river Amidst the long regard of the opening Seine.

23

SUMMER ​À Francis Vielé-Griffin.

SUMMER, rock of pure air, and you, blazing hive, O sea! Scattered into a thousand flies upon The tufts of a flesh as cool as from a pitcher, And even in the mouth where buzzes the blue sky; And you, fiery dwelling-place, immense Space, dear Space Tranquil, where the tree steams and loses a few birds, Where infinitely breaks the murmur of the mass Of the sea, of the march and the troops of the waters, Weights of odours, great ripples from the happy races On the gulf which consumes and which mounts to the sun, Pure nests, sluices of grass, shadows of hollow waves, Cradle the child ravished in a fretful slumber!

Of whom the legs (but the one is cool and released From the one more rosy), the shoulders, the hard breast, The arms that are mingling with the foamy cheek Are abandoned shining in the obscure bowl Where there filters loud sounds full of the beasts drawn up In the cages of leaves and the nets of the sea By the maritime mills and the rose-coloured huts Of day ... All the skin gilds the arbours of the air.

24

PROFUSION OF EVENING, An Abandoned Poem...

O Sun sustaining the powerful idleness Which hovers and submits to the contemplator's eye, Look!... I drink the celestial wine, and I caress The mysterious seed of the most extreme height.

I bear in a burning breast my lucid tenderness, I play with the fires of the antique inventor; But by degrees the god has lost all interest In the crimson of the air which alters so slowly.

Let the pure pasture defeat every idea, The work of settling down within their emptied realm Knows even without the birds their entire grandeur.

The cool Angel's clear eye is modest in its haste, High nativity of a star elucidated, A diamond influence that cradles the splendour ... * O evening, you come to spread a tranquil delight, Horizon of all sleeps, wonder of pious hearts, Persuasive in approach, insidious reptile, And rose inhaled by an immovable mortal Whose golden eye is bound to the skies' promises.

* On your glowing altars his favourable regard Burns, the abstracted soul, all of a precious past.

It adores in the gold which is made adorable Constructing from vapour a memorable temple, Suspends in the sombre air its risk and its reef, And flies, drunk with the flames of a passive triumph, On the gulf of golden bridges to rejoin Fortune; - While on the distant banks of the Theatre of thought, Under a flimsy mask the slim moon is gliding ...

25

* ... The wine is drunk, the man yawns, and broken is the flask.

To the marvels of the void he maintains a rancour; But the charm of evening fumes upon the balcony A confusion of women and of floating flecks ... * - O Consultant!... Solemn stopping place!... The Balance Of a gold finger weighing the motives of silence!

O sensitive wisdom between the blazing gods!

- From too beautiful space, preserve me, baluster!

There, the sea calls to me!... There, leans the illustrious Venus Vertiginous with her soft melting arms!

* My eye, though tied to the supple fate of the waves, And drinking as in dream aquarius eternal, Guards well a fixed chamber and is capable of worlds; And my cupidity for profound surprises Only just sees across the transparent cradle This woman of foam and algae and gold who rolls On the sand and the salt the grinding of the swell.

* All the same I place in the skies a spirit's gambols; I see in their vapours things from countries unknown, Goddesses of flowers pretending to be clouds, The powers of the storm wandering half-naked, And on the rocks of the air which evening darkens, Such a divinity leans down. An angel swims.

It restores all of space at each turn of its back.

I, who casts here below the shadow of somebody, However nimble in its full sovereign power, I sense who strengthens me, and pure who disdains me!

Living in a future's breast the memory marine, All the bodies of my choice are bathing in my glance!

26

* A foaming crested wave, vivid and enormous Blocks me, powerfully pure, and folds itself flat.

Roll all the way to my heart the golden distance, Wave!... Tottering suns of the ravished horizons, You will not go further than the obscure line Which divides the gods from the shadows where I live. * A breaker long and slow with the weight of the sea Scatters the ponderous charms of its white torpor Where it makes light a joy, a thirst in being blue, Pulling the dark exhausted vessel of vapour ... * But heavy and snow-clad the mountains of twilight, The cloud-banks too full and their breasts overgenerous, All the majesty of Olympia recedes, For here is the signal, here the gold of good-byes, And the spaces inhale the minutely small craft ... * Heavy pediments of sleep always uncompleted, Curtains with a ruby peculiarly held back For the faulty regard of a sombre planet, The times are accomplished, the desires are your own, And from the golden mouth, fighting against its yawns, There are torn forth the words that enchant the poet ...

The times are accomplished, the desires are your own. * Farewell, Farewell!... Towards you, O my fine images, My arms offer always the insatiable port!

Come then, be frightened off, ruffle up your feathers, Far-flying adventurous birds hounded by death!

Be quick now, be quick now!... The night presses!... Tantalus Is dying! And the ephemeral joy of the skies!

27

A rose not long ago of the fatal shadows, A rose that is the very last rose of the west Becomes horribly pale in the spacious evening ...

I see no more flutter at the belvedere's mast A drunken sylph wearing the colours of the flag, And this great port shrinks down to a dark landing-stage Visited by the chill wind I feel on my skin!

Close up now! Close up now! O windows offended!

Great eyes which are dreading the veritable night!

And you, on these great heights with stars so thickly sown, Accept, made pregnant with mystery and ennui, A maternity which silences any thoughts ...

28

ANNE ​À André Lebey.

Anne who is mingled with the pale discarded sheet Sleepy hair drawn across not properly open eyes Mirroring her distant arms turning with indolence On the colourless skin of a stomach exposed.

She empties, she fills her breast slowly with shadow, And like a memory of her own insistent flesh, A mouth exhausted and full of fiery water Rolls with an immense taste the reflection of the seas.

At the finish helpless and released to be cool, The sleeping girl abandons the clusters of colour Afloat on her pallid bed, and with a dry lip, Sucks upon the darkness a bitter breath of flowers.

And on the linen where the insensate dawn is creased, Falls, from an icy arm lightly touched with crimson, A whole dishevelled hand which has lost a delight Between its bare fingers resolved into the human.

O random! Forever, in the sleep without men Pure of the sad strokes which are their embraces, She lets loosely tumble the clusters and the apples So powerful, that hang from the trellis of bones, Which laugh, in their amber appeal for the harvest, And whose golden number and richness of movement Invoke with their vigour and strangeness of gesture What the lovers invent for the killing of love ...

*

29

Upon you, when the glance of their souls is misled, Their heart overwhelmed changes much as their voices, For the tender foreplay of their barbarous feast Brings out the dogs in heat which shudder in these kings ...

Only just do roving fingers lightly touch your life, All their blood is overcome as by a heavy sea, And some violence of delighted abysses Hurl these white swimmers onto the rocks of your flesh ...

Coral reefs delicious, Island only too near, Tender land, promise of the appeasing demons, Love reaches you, armed with the glances of hatred, To combat in the shadow a hydra of kisses!

*

Ah, more naked and with the coming dawn imbued, If that sad gold examines a lukewarm contour, Return to the shade of unconscious Self more pure, And you make a vain marble rough-hewn by the day!

Let a pale ray of sunlight your lip violate Biting into a smile every seed of their tears, Mask of a soul in sleep forever sacrificed Upon which a sudden peace surprises the sorrow!

Nevermore gild again your satin-smooth shadows, The ancient with fiery fingers who cleaves the shutters Will not come to tear you from the lazy mornings And return to the mild sun your joyous bracelets ...

But soft, the tree there that is just outside, the palm Sway its vaporous branches beyond any remorse, And in the brightness, through a few leaves, the calm bird Commences the only song which suppresses the dead.

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SONG OF SÉMIRAMIS À Camille Mauclair.

WITH the dawn, dear light-beams, my dreaming brow is circled!

Only just arisen, it sees with an eye that sleeps On the absolute marble, the pale times reflected, The hour descend on me and grow as the gold ... * ... «Exist!... Be finally yourself! ​says the Morning, O great soul, it is time that you form a body!

Hurry to choose a day worthy to bring to birth Among all other fires, your immortal treasures!

Already, against the night struggles the harsh trumpet!

A lip vibrant with life attacks the icy air; Pure gold, from tower to tower, breaks and repeats, Recalling all of space to the splendours of the past!

Lift up your true glances! Pull yourself from the shadows, And like unto a swimmer, in the full of the sea, The all-powerful heel expelling sombre waters, You, strike at the depth of being! Question your flesh, Traverse without delay its invincible meshes, Exhaust the infinite with powerless effort, And release yourself from the disorder of dramas That engender in your bed the monsters of your blood!

I hasten from the East enough for your caprice!

And I come to you offering my purest foods; That on space and on wind your ardour be nourished!

Come to join the brightness of my presentiments!» *

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- I respond!... I arise from my profound absence!

My heart wrests me from the dead who impinge on my sleep, And towards my goal, great eagle bright with power, It carries me!... I fly on high to meet the sun!

I take nothing but a rose and flee ... The lovely shaft In my side!... My head gives birth to a crowd of steps ...

They speed towards my favourite tower, where the fresh Altitude calls to me, and to it I stretch my arms!

Rise, O Semiramis, mistress of a spiral Which a heart without love thrusts up as its sole honour!

Your imperial eye thirsts for a great empire On which your hard sceptre makes it feel happiness ...

Dare the abyss!... Pass a final bridge of roses!

I approach you, peril! Pride more irritated!

These ants are all my own! These cities are my things, These roadways are the strokes of my authority!

It is a wildcat's vast skin that is my kingdom!

I have killed the lion who used to wear this skin; But still the aroma of a ferocious phantom Hovers laden with death, and takes charge of my flock!

At last, I offer the sun the secret of my charms!

Never has it gilded a threshold so gracious!

But of my fragility I taste the dangers Between the double call of the earth and the skies.

Repast of my power, intelligible orgy, What vaporous square of roofs and of forests Sets at the feet of the pure and divine look-out, This calm distancing of secret occurrences!

The soul at last on this summit has found its dwellings!

O out of what grandeur, does it draw its grandeur When my heart lifted up on interior wings Opens to the sky in myself another deepness!

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Anxious for the azure, by its glory consumed, Breast, abyss of shadows with its nostrils of flesh, Inhale this incense of the souls and of the smoke Which rises from a city as it does from the sea!

O sun, O sun, laugh as you look down on my hives!

The intense and restless noises of Babylon, All the hubbub of chariots, bugles, chains of jugs And groans of the stones to the mortals who construct.

How they flatter my wish for implacable temples, The sharp sounds of the saw and the cry of the chisel, And these moans of the marble and of the cables Which fill the living air with structure and with birds!

I see my new temple born among all the worlds, And my vow take place in the abode of destinies; It seems of itself to be raised to the sky by waves Underneath the seething mass of indistinct actions.

Stupid people, to whom my own power enchains me, Alas! my very pride has need of your own hands!

And why force my heart if it does not love this hatred Whose innumerable head is so soft to my steps?

Smooth, it murmurs to me with such music as when The calm of the wave is formed out of its fury, When it recovers peace at the feet of a mortal But holds in reserve a return of its terror.

In vain I hear rise up against my august face This murmuring of fear and of ferocity: To the image of the gods the great soul is unjust In as much as it fits itself for necessity!

Although sometimes touched by the gentleness of love, All the same no tenderness and no renouncements Will leave me a captive and a sleeping victim In the powerful bonds of the sleep of lovers!

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Kisses, the spite of love, the lowness of its bliss, O the movements marine of astounded lovers, My heart has been my counsel in such solitudes, And so high have I planted my hanging gardens That my supreme flowers expect naught but lightning And in spite of the tears of the loveliest lovers, For my roses, the hand that touches them falls to dust: My sweetest memories are established upon tombs!

They are dear to my heart the temples given birth When slowly drawn to life from the dream of my breasts, I see a monument of massive triumphant shape Assemble in my sight the shadow of my designs!

Clash, O golden cymbals, rhythmical mamillae, And roses quivering on my pure inner wall!

That I myself might vanish in my own immense thoughts, Wise Semiramis, an enchantress and a king!

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THE LOVER OF POEMS IF I suddenly look at my real thought, I am not consoled with having to subject myself to this interior word without being and without origin; these ephemeral figures; and this infinity of enterprises interrupted by their own facility, which transform themselves the one into the other, except that nothing is changed with them. Incoherent without its appearance, as instantaneously non-existent as it is spontaneous, thought, by its very nature, lacks style.

BUT I have not the power all day every day to offer to my attention a few necessary beings, nor to feign the spiritual obstacles which establish an appearance of commencement, of fullness and of finish, in place of my insupportable flight.

A poem is a duration, during which, reader, I breathe in time with a pre-established law; I give my breath and the machinery of my voice; or only their power, which reconciles itself with the silence.

I abandon myself to the adorable allure: interpret, live where the words take me. Their appearance is written down. Their sonorities organised. Their disturbance itself composed, after a prior meditation, and they will rush together themselves in groups magnificent or pure, in their resonance. Even my astonishments are assured: they are hidden in advance, and become a part of numbers.

MOVED by the fatal handwriting, and if the always future metre links together my memory without return, I experience each word in all its force, for having been indefinitely awaited.

This measure which carries me and which I colour, guards me from true and from false.

Neither doubt nor my division, neither reason nor my distraction. No hazard, but an extraordinary chance fortifies. I find without effort the language and this source of happiness; and I think by artifice, a thought quite certain, marvellously provident, - with the gaps calculated, without involuntary obscurities, whose movement orders me and whose quantity fulfils me: a thought singularly completed.

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LA JEUNE PARQUE (The Young Fate)

​ o André Gide T For so many years I have neglected the art of verse: to test out and to compel myself again, I have done this exercise which I dedicate to you.

1917 Have the Heavens formed this mass of marvels To be the dwelling place of a serpent?

Pierre CORNEILLE.

WHO weeps there, if not simply the wind, at this hour Alone, with extremest diamonds?... But who weeps, So close to myself at the moment of weeping?

This hand, on these contours it dreams of caressing, In abstract obedience to some profound purpose, Waits for my weakness to dissolve into a tear, And slowly dividing the strands of my destiny, In the purest silence enlighten a broken heart.

The sea-swell murmurs to me a shadow of reproach, Or retreats here below, into its rocky gorges, Like a thing disappointed having drunk bitterly, A rumour of complaint and recovering strength…

What are you doing, firm, under this icy hand, And what quiverings set up in a faded leaf Recovers greenness in you, islands of my bare breasts?...

I scintillate, at one with this unknown heaven…

Immense clusters sparkle at my thirst for disasters.

All-powerful outsiders, inevitable stars Who deign to glimmer from your temporal distance With I know not what supernatural purity; You who plunge into mortals to the point of tears

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These supreme splinters, these invincible weapons, And these yearnings towards your own eternity, I am alone with you, trembling, have forsaken My bed; and on this tidal reef maddened by marvels, I ask of my heart what sorrow awakened it, What crime of my own or upon me committed?... ... Or if the evil that tracks me encloses a dream, When (as a velvet breath flares up the gold of lamps) I am with solid arms encircling my temples, And for long my soul awaits illumination?

All things? But all things are me, mistress of my flesh, Hardening with a shiver at its own strange extent, And in my gentle bonds, and my suspended blood, I have watched me watching, sinuous, and gilded With glance after glance, my own profoundest forests.

I was following a snake who came from biting me.

WHAT a coil of desires, his train!... What a jumble Of treasures being snatched away from my greediness, And what a sombre thirst for more lucidity!

O subtle ruse!... In that gleaming sorrow abandoned I sensed myself being known much more than wounded…

In the most treacherous soul, a thing in me is born; The poison, my poison, enlightens as it knows me: It brings colour to a virgin absorbed in herself, Jealous... But of whom, jealous and by whom menaced?

And what a silence speaks to my sole possessor?

O gods! In my heavy wound a secret sister Burns, who prefers herself to any attentiveness.

«GO! I have no more need of your native innocence, Dear Serpent... Entwined in myself, I am dizzy!

Cease from offering me the puzzle of your knots Or your faithfulness which flees me even as it probes…

My soul may suffice, adornment of a ruin!

She knows, on my shadow astray with her agonies, At my breast, in the night, to bite at enchanting rocks;

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She has suckled there for long the milk of reveries…

Let slacken then the grasp of those bejewelled arms That menace with their love my spiritual fate…

You can do nothing for me that will not be less cruel, Less desirable... Pacify then, calm these waves, Call back these troubled eddies, these squalid promises…

My surprise is over, and my eyes are open wide.

I expected no less of my lush wildernesses Than that they would give birth to a rage so entwined: Their passionate depths are made aridly brilliant The more I advance and with altered perspective See hopelessly limitless infernos of thought…

I know... My weariness is at times a theatre.

No mind is so pure and free from idolatry It can burn by itself with the ardour of torches Nor escape from the walls of its own mournful tomb.

All is born here below of an infinite waiting.

The very shade yields to a certain agony, The meagre soul half-opens, and a monster riots That writhes about itself at a threshold of fire…

But, though capricious and prompt you make your appearance, Reptile, o lively curves all eager for caresses, Such all but impatience and such heavy languor, What are you, beside my night's interminable length?

You watched as I slept in my beautiful negligence…

But with these my perils, I am in complicity, More versatile, o Thyrsus, and more treacherous than they.

Leave me! thread your slimy way back as you darkly came!

Go seek out some closed eyes for your monstrous dances.

Glide towards other beds with your successive skins, Hatch out on other hearts the seeds of their own evil, So that fast in the coils of your animal dream They may gasp until day in their anxious innocence!...

Me, I am awake. I arise, pale and prodigious, All humid with the tears which I have left unshed, From an absence with mortal contours yet cradled By myself alone... And breaking from a serene tomb, I lean here uneasy and at once most noble, My visions so many amongst the night and the eye, The least flickering movements consulting my pride.»

BUT I trembled at the loss of a divine sorrow!

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I kissed on my hand that all but invisible bite, And I knew nothing more of my insensate body That was, than a flame which was burning about my sides: Farewell, I thought, MYSELF, mortal sister, falsehood‌ HARMONIOUS ME, different from a dream, Firm and flexible female of silences followed By pure acts!... Brow limpid, and ravished by waves, In as much as the wind's vague roughness can achieve, Mingling and uplifting long light strands in its flight, Speak!... I was the equal and the bride of the day, Sole smiling support that I had fashioned from love To the all-powerful altitude adoring...

What brightness on my lashes so blindly gilded, O eyelids still oppressed by a night of treasure, While I prayed as I grouped in your golden shadows!

Open to the eternal which seemed to enclose me, I offered my velvet fruit for it to devour; Nothing murmured to me that a desire to die Might under the sun in this golden pulp ripen: My bitterest savour had not yet come to me.

I was giving up nothing but my naked shoulder To the light; and upon this honeysweet bosom, Whose tender birth was by the heavens accomplished, There descended drowsily the pattern of the world.

Then in the brilliant god, a wandering captive, Burning I rustled and trod on the fertile soil, My shadows blending and parting under the linen.

Happy! At the same height as those fine-looking sheaves, Letting their downfolding leaves respond to my robe, As though in abasement of their so fragile pride; And if, reacting against this new-found freedom, If the robe is torn upon a refractory thorn, The taut curve of my body admits and proclaims it, Nude through the billowing veil of living colours Which disputes my rights and links me with the flowers!

I almost half-regret this illusory power‌ One with the desire, my obedience remained Imminent, tied still by habit to these burnished knees; My wishes were with such rapid movements accomplished

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That I felt my cause as being scarcely more agile!

Towards my luminous senses my fair clay swum, And in the fervent peace of such natural dreams, All these infinite steps appeared to me eternal.

Except that, o Splendour, at my feet the enemy, My shadow! a mobile and a supple winding-sheet, Painted my absence skimming effortlessly over The earth where I was fleeing from this weightless death.

Between the rose and me, I see that it is hiding; It dances in the dust, it disturbs no foliage As it glides by, but passes, and destroys everywhere‌ Glide by! O ship of death...

AND I live, upstanding, Hard, and by my own nothingness secretly armed, But, as when the cheek with love is ardently burning, And the nostril catches on the wind the orange-tree, I render to the day no more than a stranger's glance‌ Oh! to what extent may in my seeking night grow The mysterious half of my heart thus divided, And what sombre attempts at the depth of my art!...

Far from pure surroundings, I am captive, and held By the disappearance of worn out fragrances, I sense beneath sunbeams, trembling on my statue, A fickle play of gold, which covers the marble.

But I know what I see with my departed glance; My dark eye is the doorway to infernal dwellings!

I think, abandoning to the breeze the hours And the soul which comes not back from the bitter shrubs, I think, at the golden brink of the universe, Of that longing for death which possessed the Syble And which feeds on the hope that the last days are near.

I renew in myself my enigmas, my gods, My steps interrupted by heavenly discourse, My pauses, on a foot with its burden of dreams, Which follow and mirror a bird's varying flight, Once again wagering on the sun against nothing, And burning, grave goal of my astonished marble.

O DANGEROUSLY to be a prey of one's own gaze!

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For the eye of the mind upon its silken beaches Has already seen too many days glimmer and fade Whose progress and colours I was able to predict.

The ennui, the bright ennui which mirrored their shading, Gave me a deadly head start upon my own life: The dawn unveiled to me all of the adverse day.

I was neither living nor dead; and perhaps, half Immortal, dreaming that even the future itself Was nothing but a diamond set in that diadem Where is exchanged the chill of misfortunes not yet born With many other absolutes fiery at my brow.

Will it then dare, Old Time, from my divers buried days, Resuscitate an evening favoured by the doves, An evening in whose wake a tattered shred unwinds To my obedient childhood's reflected blushes, And bathe in its emerald a lasting rose of shame?

MEMORY, o log-pyre, whose golden breeze affronts, Blow my mask scarlet impregnating the refusal To be in myself in flame other than what I was…

Come, my blood, come redden the pallid circumstance That made noble the azure of the holy distance, And the scarce moving iris of the time I adored!

Come squander upon me this gift bleached of colour; Come! that I may recognise and that I may detest, This child who takes umbrage, this silent complicity, This evidential trouble who bathes in the wood…

And from my frozen breast let fresh rebound the voice That I did not know so raucous or so veiled with love…

The charming neck still searching for the winged huntress.

My heart was it so close to a heart about to fail?

Was it then me, fringed lashes, who thought to bury myself In a backward looking sweetness smiling at your threats…

O tendrils on my cheek errant with stubborn threads, Or you... of lashes woven and of fluid shafts, Tender glow of an evening broken by doubtful arms?

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MY EYES TRACE OUT MY TEMPLE, SET IT IN THE HEAVENS! THAT ON ME MAY REPOSE AN UNPARALLELED ALTAR! My whole body cried out the pallor and the stone…

The earth is to me no more than a coloured headband Which sliding down declines a vertiginous white brow...

The whole universe falters and trembles on my stalk, The woven crown of thought escapes my spirit quite, And Death wants to inhale this rose beyond all price Whose sweetness is important to his shadowy ends!

What if my soft fragrance goes to your hollow head, O Death, inhale then at last this slave of a king: Call me by name, release me!... And lose all hope of me, So weary of myself, an image self-condemned!

Listen... Wait no longer... The revivifying year Predicates through all my blood its secret movements: The frost gives up reluctantly its final diamonds…

Tomorrow, with a sigh of glittering Goodness, The spring will come to shatter the frozen fountains: The astounding spring laughs, violates... We know not where It comes from? But its naive words murmur so sweetly That a tenderness takes the earth to its very bowels…

The trees fill out again and replenish their bark Laden with many limbs and too many horizons, Moving towards the sun their thunderous fleeces, Stretching up into the bitter air all of their wings With leaves in their thousands which they flourish as new…

Do you not hear tremble these ethereal names, O Deaf One!... And in this space oppressed by its bonds, Vibrant with living wood bent upwards by its summit, For and against the gods plies the unanimous tree, The floating forest out of whose encrusted trunks They reverently bear their incredible heads, Heartbroken departures to superb scattered islands, A tender stream, o Death, and hidden under the grass?

WHO can resist, among mortals, these upheavals?

Who among mortals can?

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With me so pure, my knees Sensing the terror of the knees' defencelessness...

The air exhausts me. The bird pierces with childhood's cries Past hearing... the same shadow itself which grips my heart, And, roses! my sigh that lifts you up, conqueror Alas! of gentle arms that shut you in the basket…

Oh! amongst my hairs one weighs with the weight of a bee, Plunging always more drunk and with a kiss more sharp, The delicious point of my ambiguous day…

The Light!... Or you, o Death! But the promptest may take me!...

My heart beats! my heart beats! My breast burns and leads me!

Ah! that it may expand, swelling and straining, this hard Yet most mild witness captive in my network of blue…

Hard in me... but so soft in the infinite mouth!...

Dear nascent phantoms whose cravings unite in me, Desires! Glowing faces!... And you, fine fruits of love, Have the gods fashioned in me these maternal contours And these sinuous sides, these folds and these waiting cups, So that life might embrace an altar of delights, Where the alien soul blends in eternal returns, The semen, the milk, and the blood forever flow?

No! Horrible insight, atrocious harmony!

Every kiss the presage of a fresh agony…

I see, I see adrift, fleeing the honour of flesh The impotent spirits in their bitter millions…

No, breath! No, glances, tenderness... my companions, Thirsty people imploring me to let you live, No, you should not depend upon me for life!... Go, Spectres, sighs which the night unavailingly exhales, Go join the dead in their impalpable numbers!

I will not bestow the light upon these shadows, I keep watch far from you, a spirit grim and clear…

No! You should not depend on the lightning of my lips!...

And then... my heart also refuses you its thunder.

I have pity on us all, o swirling winds of dust!

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Great Gods! I wander lost in your baffling ways!

I will implore no more your weak illumination, Envious for so long to melt upon my face, O most imminent tear, which is my sole response, A tear that trembles as my human glance surveys The many divers paths which lead us to the grave; You proceed from the soul, that labyrinth of pride.

You carry from my heart this drop under duress, This mere abstraction of my most precious substance That comes to sacrifice my shades before my eyes, Tender libation to a motive still in doubt!

From a grotto of fear at my hollowed out depth The mysterious salt mutely pervades the water.

From where are you born? What labour always sad and new Draws you tardily out, tear, from the bitter shadow?

You mounted by my stages as mortal and mother, And heartbreaking your route, an unrelenting burden, In the time of my life, the slow pace that you take Suffocates me... I keep silent, drink your certain course…

- Who called upon you for help to assuage my young wound?

But wounding injuries, sobs, sombre attempts, why?

For whom then, cruel jewels, do you mark this cold body, Blind with groping fingers hoping to evade hope!

Where does it go, unanswered by its own ignorance, This body in the dark night astonished by its faith?

Restless earth... and with the seaweed mingled, carry me, Carry me softly... Has my weakness like unto snow Strength enough to proceed until it finds its snare?

Where linger you, my swan, where seek you out your flight? ... Most precious hardness... O awareness of the soil, My step founded upon you a sacred confidence!

But beneath the living foot that explores and creates And touches with horror its agreement made at birth, This so firm seeming earth my pedestal achieves.

Not far off, among these steps, my precipice dreams…

The insensate rock, seaweed slippery, propitious To flight, (since in itself ineffably alone), Commences... And the wind seems to blow through a shroud Weaving with its rumours of the sea a confused web, Mingling with the breaking of the waves, and the oars…

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So many long drawn out gulps, and clashing death-rattles, Shattered, returned by the sea... and the lots all cast Wild divers ways rolled to voracious oblivion...

Alas! will he who finds the tracks of my naked feet Stop long enough to consider someone not himself?

Restless earth, and with the seaweed mingled, carry me!

MYSTERIOUS ME, even so, you live once more!

You go to recognise yourself at the break of dawn Bitterly the same...

A reflection from the sea Emerges... And on its lips, a smile of yesterday Wearily heralding the effacement of all signs, Chill in the eastern sky already the pale lines Of light and of stone, and the abundant prison Round which will float the ring of the horizon only‌ Look: an arm of the purist is seen, self-denuded.

I see you again, my arm... You bear the dawn...

O rude Awakening of a victim reprieved... and threshold So mild... so clear, how flattering, the reef's appearance, The low waters, and the wash of the muffled sea-swell!...

The darkness which deserts me, an undying victim, Discloses me reddened thus with new desires, On the terrible altar of all my memories.

There, the sea-foam strives to make itself visible; And there, unsteady on a craft that will respond To each buffeting wave, an eternal fisherman.

All then conspires to accomplish its solemn act Of always returning incomparable and chaste, And of restoring the tomb possessed of a god To its gracious state of universal laughter.

HAIL! Divinities made by the rose and the salt, And the first playthings of the growing early light, Islands!... Hives before long, when the primary flame Will serve to make your rock, o islands that I predict,

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Feel in its reddening the powers of paradise; Peaks that a fruitful fire scarcely intimidates, Woods that will be humming with beasts and with ideas, With hymns of men fulfilled by the gifts of a just sky, Islands! in the murmur of your sea-bright girdle, Mothers ever virgin, yet bearing these same marks, You are to me as I kneel so marvellously Fates: Nothing can match above ground the flowers you put forth, But, in the hidden depth, your feet are cold as ice!

THE soul prepares itself under the eased temple, My death, a child secret and already established, And you, divine disgusts that have given me flight, Chaste deviations from the lustre of my fate, Have you no more, fervour, than a noble duration?

No one has with the gods ever ventured closer Nor dared paint on her forehead their ravishing breath, And from the depths of the perfect night imploring, To claim on its very lip a murmur supreme...

I resisted the splendour of a death so pure As I once long ago had resisted the sun‌ My body in despair twisting the naked torso Where the soul, drunk on self, on silence and on glory, Ready to be subsumed by its own memory, Listens, full of hope, beating upon the pious wall Of this heart, - which it wrecks with mysterious blows, Until it can no more hold than by its indulgence A delicate trembling of a leaf, my presence...

Waiting in vain, and vainly... She may then not die Who before her mirror weeps in order to feel.

O SHOULD I NOT then, idiot, have accomplished My marvellous end of selecting for torture This lucid disdain for the nuances of fate?

Will you nevermore find so transparent a death Nor a more pure slope where I climb to my ruin Than in this long regard of a victim laid half-open, Pale, who has resigned herself and bleeds without regret?

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What's all this blood to her when no longer her secret?

In what a whitening peace this crimson rush leaves her, At the limits of being, and lovely in her weakness!

She calms thus the time that comes but to abolish, The moment supreme may not make her more pallid, So much the empty flesh kisses a sombre spring!...

She herself always made more alone and more remote…

And me, of a like destiny, the heart always closer, My cortège, in spirit, rocked by cypresses asleep...

Towards an aromatic wisp of future smoke, I feel myself conducted, offered up and consumed, All, all a long-destined promise to the happy clouds!

What's more, I appear to myself that vaporous tree, Of which its majesty so lightly thrown away Is wholly abandoned to the love of expansion.

Being's immenseness wins me, and from my divine heart The incense that burns breaths out a form without end…

All the body radiant trembles in my essence!...

No, no!... Kindle no more this vague recollection!

Sombre lily! Obscure hint of the heavens, Your strength could not shatter so precious a vessel…

Among all the instants you touched on the supreme…

- But who then could prevail over the same power, So eager with your eyes to contemplate the day That has chosen your brow for its luminous tower?

Seek out, the least, to tell you, by what silent process The night, amid the dead, has guided you back to day?

Recall yourself to yourself, take up instinctively This thread (your gilded touch disputes it with the morn), This thread whose tenuity so blindly followed Even unto this coastline restored to you your life…

Be discerning... cruel... or more subtle still!... Lie But learn!... Instruct me by whatever enchantments, Coward who knows not how to flee her tepid breathing Nor her concern for a breast of sweet-smelling clay, By what return to yourself, reptile, did you renew Your cavernous perfumes and your gloomy spirits?

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YESTERDAY the deep flesh, yesterday, the ruling flesh Betrayed me... Oh! with no dream, and without a caress!...

No demon, no perfume offered to me the peril Of imagined arms dying upon a manly neck; Nor, from out of the Swan-God, have plumes offended by His own brilliant whiteness brushed lightly across my thought...

He would have known all the same the most tender of nests!

For with all the favour of my limbs united, Virgin, I was in that shade a choicest offering…

But the sleep of the spirit is a sweetness so great, And knotted to myself by the slack of my hair, I have languidly lost my autonomous kingdom.

In the midst of my arms, I became another…

Who is alienated?... Who flies?... Who wallows?...

On what obscure detour, was my heart melted?

What conch is repeating the name that I have lost?

Do I know, what treacherous ebb tide stranded me In my extremity so pure and premature, And in me revived the meaning of my immense sigh?

Like the bird that alights, I must be lulled to rest.

It was the hour, perhaps, when the prophetess Dwelling within is fatigued and loses interest: She is no longer the same... A profound infant On the untrodden ways vain in her own defence, Asking again from afar for hands she abandoned.

One must concede to the wishes of the holy dead And take for her face a breath of air...

But softly, I am here: my forehead is close to its consent...

This body, I pardon it, and I taste the ashes.

I give myself wholly up to the happy descent, Open to the dark witnesses, the tormented arms, Among the words without end, without me, stammered out…

Sleep, my wisdom, sleep. Form for yourself this absence; Return to the seed and the sombre innocence.

Resign your life for that of the serpents, the treasures…

Sleep always! Descend, sleep always! Descend, sleep, sleep!

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(The lowly doorway is a ring... and where the gauze Is passed through... All dies, all laughs in the twittering throat‌ The bird drinks from your mouth and you may not see him‌ Come lower still, speak low... The dark is not so dark...)

DELICIOUS WINDING-SHEETS, my lukewarm disorder, Bed where I loose myself, question myself and concede, Where I was wont to take my heart to quench its beatings, Almost a living tomb within my own apartments, Who breaths, and to whom even eternity listens, Place full of myself which has assumed me wholly, O form of my form and out of the hollow heat Which my return to myself acknowledges theirs, Here is where so much of pride immersed in your folds Is blent at the last with the pettiness of the dream!

In your sheets, where smoothly she mimics her own death The reluctant idol disposes herself and sleeps, Weary absolute woman, and the eyes in their tears, When, of her naked secrets the caves and the charms, And the rest of the love with which she guards her body Have corrupted her ruin and her accords with death.

Ark completely secret, and nevertheless so near, My transports, this night, were thinking to break your chains; I have done no more than cradle with lamentations Your flanks so weighted down with day and creations!

What! my eyes coldly misled by so much blueness Can watch the perishing of a star fine and rare, And the young sun of my earliest astonishments Seems like a grandmother shining down on agonies, So much does the flame of remorse ravish existence, And composes out of the dawn a precious substance That would already form the substance of a tomb!...

O, on all the sea, on my feet, it is beautiful!

You draw near!... I am always the one that you breathe, My dissolving veil drifts me towards your empires ... Well, have I done no more, vain farewells if I live, Than form dreams?... If I come, in ravishing garments, Unto this brink, without horror, to breath the high foam, Drink in through my eyes the vast and smiling bitterness,

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A being against the wind, in the sharpest of air, Receiving full in the face a call from the sea; If the intense soul breathes, and there furiously swells Sheer wave out of exhausted wave, and if the wave Booms, to immolate a monster of naivety, And comes from the high seas to vomit its profoundness On this rock, from where spurts even to my very thoughts A dazzling array of frozen glittering sparks, And over all my skin bites a harsh awakening, Well, in spite of myself, it needs must be, o Sun, That I adore my heart where you come yourself to know, Fresh and powerful return of the delight of birth, Fire towards whom one elevates a virgin of blood Under the golden species of a breast's thanksgiving!

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CHARMES Deducere carmen.

BREAK OF DAY ​À Paul Poujaud.

THE morose confusion Which serves for me as sleep, Is dissolved by the rose Appearance of the sun.

I in my soul advance All winged with confidence: It is the day's first prayer!

Scarcely out on the sands, I make admirable steps In the footprints of my reason.

All hail! asleep again In the twinship of your smiles, Friendly similarities That sparkle amid the words!

In the hubbub of the bees I will be for you a net, And on the trembling rungs Of my ladder made of gold, My evaporating prudence Already sets its pure foot.

What a dawn on these haunches Which are starting to tremble!

Already stretching muscles That had seemed to be asleep: One eager, another yawning; And on a tortoiseshell comb Distracted by vague fingers, From a dream that is still to come, The lazy one is bound up To the premises of its voice.

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What! is it you, fair-weather friends!

What were you doing, this night, Soul-mistresses, Ideas, Made courtesans by boredom?

- Always wise, they tell me, Our immortal attendance Has never betrayed your roof!

We have not been far away But secretive as spiders In the darkness of yourself!

Will you never be by joy made Drunk! see come from the shadows Ten thousand silken suns Woven from your enigmas?

Look at what we have done: We have across your abysses Stretched out our primitive threads, And taken from naked nature In a tenuous fine-spun weft Of trembling preparations ...

Their spiritual cobweb, I break it, and set off to find In my own sensual forest The oracles of my song.

Being! Universal ear!

All the soul prepares itself At the utmost of desire ...

It hears itself tremble And sometimes my lips appear To grasp its quivering.

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Here are my shadowy vines, The cradles of my hazards!

The images are numerous And the equal of my regards ...

Every leaf presents to me An accommodating source Where I drink this frail rumour ...

I am all pulp, all kernel, Every calyx demands of me That I wait for its fruit.

I do not fear the thorns!

The waking is good, though hard!

This plundering of absolutes Wants nothing but certainty: It is not to ravish a world Of an injury so profound That will not to the ravisher Be a fruitful injury, And whose own blood assures him Of being the true possessor.

I approach the transparency Of the invisible pond Where swims my eternal Hope Borne breast-high by the water.

Its neck intersects vague time And raises on high this wave Which makes a neck without equal ...

It senses beneath calm waters The infinite profundity, And shivers up from the toe.

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TO A PLANE TREE For AndrĂŠ Fontainas.

YOU bow down, great Plane-tree, and propose yourself nude, White as a young Scythian, But naively you catch, and your foot is restrained By your immobile site.

Reverberant shadow in which the same skies That carry you, are appeased, The dark mother constraining the pure-born foot Weighed by the mire down.

The winds do not want your adventuring brow; The tender and sombre earth, O Plane-tree, will never permit you one step To scandalise your shadow!

That brow can but access those luminous rungs Which your sap exalts you to; You may grow, naively, but not shatter the bonds Of an eternal halt!

Feel all around you other living things bound By this ancient hydra; Your equals are numerous, the poplars and pines, The ilyx and the maple, Who, seized by the dead, their wild tousled feet held In this muddle of ashes, Sense the fading of flowers, and their semen thus winged Light in the air descending.

The aspen, the hornbeam, and the beech-tree formed In the shape of four young women, Keep ceaselessly battering a sky always closed, Their branching oars dressed in vain.

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They live separate lives, but their tears are conjoined In the one lonely absence, And their silvery limbs are but vainly cut through At the sweet moment of birth.

When the soul in the evening is slowly breathed out Mounting to Aphrodite, The virgin in shadows must, in silence, sit, Hot all over with shame.

She feels herself caught out, and pale, and a part Of this so tender portent Which the flesh of today to the future turns With a youthful countenance...

But you, of arms purer than animal arms You who plunge them in the gold, You who form from the day the phantom of evils That sleep makes into dreams, High profusion of leaves, agitation so proud When the bitter northern Sounds, at your golden heights, the young wintry skies On your harps, o Plane-tree, Dare to moan!... It must, o supple flesh of wood, Make you twist, untwist yourself, Complain but not break, restore to the winds the voice They seek out in disorder!

Flagellate yourself!... Be like the impatient martyr Who is by his own self flayed, And dispute with the flames powerless to depart Their own return to the torch!

So that a hymn might rise to birds as yet unborn, And that the pure of soul May make tremble with hope the leaves of a trunk That is dreaming of the flame,

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I have chosen you, powerful presence of the park, Made drunken by your tossing, Since the sky teaches you, and urges you, o great bow, To give it back a language!

O amorously rival to the Dryads of old, The poet alone is fit To stroke your burnished side as he would stroke the Horse On the ambitious flank!...

- No, says the tree. It says: ​No! ​by the glittering Of its magnificent head, Which the tempest treats just as universally As it does a blade of grass!

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CANTICLE OF THE COLUMNS

Ă€ LĂŠon-Paul Fargue.

GRACEFUL columns, wearing Hats bedecked for the day, With real birds embellished Who walk and look around, Graceful columns, sounding Your orchestra of forms!

Each one sacrificing Silence for unison.

- What do you lift so high, Of equal radiance?

- The wish to make faultless Our studious graces!

We sing at the same time We carry the heavens!

O wise and single voice Which makes songs for the eyes!

Behold these guileless hymns!

What rich sonority Our limpid elements Draw out of the brightness!

So chilly and gilded We remained in our beds By the chisel rescued, To become these lilies!

In our beds of crystal We remained until called, Then by great metal claws We were carved out and dressed.

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For confronting the moon, Both the moon and the sun, We were polished each one Like a nail on a toe!

Serving-maids without knees, Who smile without faces, The young girl facing us Understands pure legs.

Alike in piety, A blindfold to the nose And our sumptuous ears Deaf to the white burden, A temple on the eyes Dark for eternity, We go without the gods Towards the deity!

Our antiquated youth, Dull flesh and fine shadows, Are proud of the finesse Which is born of numbers!

Daughters of gold numbers, Made strong by heaven's laws, On us descends and sleeps A honey-coloured god.

He sleeps content, the Day, Who each day offers up At the table of love Becalmed upon our brows.

Immaculate sisters, Half burning, half icy, We took but for dancers Breezes and withered leaves,

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And tens of centuries, And the passing peoples, It is all a deep once, A once never enough!

Beneath even our loves More heavy than the earth We pass across the days As a stone skims water!

We march onward through time And our dazzling bodies Have ineffable steps Which are marked in fables...

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THE BEE

​To Francis de Miomandre.

WHAT, and so fine, and yet so deadly, Whatever your sting is, golden bee, I have not, in my tender basket, Thrown anything but a dream of lace.

Puncture the handsome hollow breast, Upon which Love either sleeps or dies, So that a drop of my ruby self Comes to this smug rebellious flesh!

I have great need of a torment swift: An evil sudden and over soon Is better than a torture waiting!

Let then my senses be enlightened By this minuscule golden warning Without which Love is asleep or dies!

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POETRY

IN the grip of the surprise, A mouth that has been drinking At the breast of Poetry Jerks its downiness away: - O my mother Intelligence, From which all sweetness flowed, What is this negligence That lets your milk run dry!

Scarcely at rest on your bosom, Overwhelmed with pure bonds, I was lulled by the sea waters Of your heart laden with goods; Scarcely, within your sombre sky, Exhausted by your beauty, I sensed, as I drank the darkness, My being invaded with light!

God lost in his own essence, And therefore exquisitely Receptive to the knowledge Of supreme assurances, I am one with the pure night, I no longer know how to die, For a river without end Seems to be running through me ...

Tell me, by what fruitless fear, By what shadow of despite, This marvellous inspiration Has been cut off from my lips?

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O rigour, you signal to me That I no longer please my soul!

The silence of the swan's flight Can between us no longer reign!

Immortal one, your closed eye Refuses me my treasures, And the flesh is turned to stone That was soft under my body!

You deprive me of the heavens, By what unjust reversal?

What will you be without my lips?

What will I be without love?

But the Source suspended thus Answers me without harshness: - With such force you have bitten me That my heart has ceased to beat!

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THE STEPS

YOUR steps, children of my silence, So slowly, religiously placed, Towards the bed of my vigilance Proceed at a dumb and icy pace.

Person pure, shadow divine, They are so sweet, your steps untrod!

Gods!... all the gifts that I divine Come to me on these naked feet!

If, as your lips come closer still, You prepare to appease me thus, Make the inhabitant of my thoughts Ripe for the nourishment of a kiss, Do not hasten this tender act, Sweetness of being and non-being, For I have lived to wait for you, And my heart was nothing but your steps.

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THE BELT

WHEN the sunset glow of a cheek Departs at last from cherished eyes And a vanishing point of gold From the roses with which time plays, Before the muteness of delight To which just such a picture binds, Dances the Shadow of a belt Which the evening almost grasps.

This belt so restlessly moving Produced with ethereal breath Sets the supreme link trembling That my silence has with this world...

Absent, present... I am alone, And sombre, o suave winding-sheet.

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THE SLEEPING GIRL

​To Lucien Fabre.

WHAT secrets in her heart are burning my young friend, Soul through this soft mask aspiring to be a flower?

From what vain nutriments do her naive flushes Create all this radiance in a sleeping woman?

Breathing, dreams, quietness, invincible respite, You victories, o peace more powerful than a tear, When from this deepest sleep the waters grave and vast Conspire upon the breast of such an enemy.

Sleeping girl, golden mass of shadows and abandons, Your redoubtable repose is laden with such gifts, O hind who with languor lingers close to a bunch, That despite the absent soul, occupied with its hells, Your form as pure womb where a fluid arm is draped, Keeps watch; your form keeps watch, and my eyes are open.

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FRAGMENTS FROM NARCISSUS

I

Cur aliquid vidi?

HOW you glimmer at the last, pure end of my days!

This evening, like a stag's, the flight towards the source Ceases not till it falls in the midst of the reeds, My craving brings me down to the same water's edge.

But, for quenching the thirst of this curious love, I will not agitate the mysterious waves: O Nymphs! if you love me, you forever must sleep!

The least soul in the air can still make you tremble; Even, in its weakness, from the shadows escaped, If the leaf's frantic flight lightly touches the pond, That would suffice to break a sleeping universe ...

Your sleep is of importance to my enchantment, It fears even the shudder of a feather's fall!

Guard well for me and long this visage for a dream Conceivable alone to an absence divine!

Sleep of the nymphs, the sky, never cease to see me!

Dream, dream of me!... Without you, O lovely fountains, My beauty, my sorrow, would for me be doubtful things.

I would seek out in vain that which I hold most dear, Its confused tenderness would astonish my flesh, And my sorrowful looks, unaware of my charms, To others that myself would offer up their tears ...

You are waiting, perhaps, for a face without tears, You calm ones, you always with leaves and with flowers, And from incorruptible heights you have haunted, O Nymphs!... But docile to the slopes thus enchanted Where towards you I made such invincible paths, Suffer this lovely glimpse of human disorders!

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Happy your shifting forms, Waters plain and profound!

I am alone!... If the Gods, the echoes and the waves And if so many sighs permit it well and good!

Alone!... but still the one who draws near to himself When he draws near the banks this foliage blesses ...

From summits, winds already end the pure plunder; The waters' voice changes, and speaks of the evening; A great calm attends me, where I listen for hope.

I hear night grasses grow in the holy shadow, And the deceitful moon elevates her mirror Even to the secrets of the dried up fountain ...

Even to the secrets which I fear to find out, Even to the sanctum of the love of oneself, Nothing from the silence of the evening can escape ...

The night upon my flesh comes with breath that I love.

Its fresh voice cause my vows to tremble with consent; Except that, in the breeze, it would appear to lie, So much the quivering of its wordless temple Conspires with the silence of so spacious a site.

O sweetness of surviving the strength of the day, When it withdraws at last blushing rose as with love, Still burning a little, and weary, but fulfilled, And with so many treasures tenderly weighed down Of which such memories render crimson its death, And by these made happy it kneels down in the gold, Then spreads out, merges with, loses its precious wine, And fades into a dream which the evening will change.

What loss in oneself offered by so calm a place!

The soul, about to die, bends down to a God Which it asks of the wave, now deserted, and worthy In its lustre, of the smooth effacement of a swan ...

No flocks and no herds at these waters ever drank!

Of others, straying here, you might find the repose, And in the sombre earth, a bright opening tomb ...

But this is not the calm, alas! which I have found!

When the opaque delight where this clarity sleeps Yields up to my body the horror of lonely leaves, Then, victor of the shade, O my tyrannous body, Pushing back to the woods their panicky blackness,

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You regret all too soon their everlasting night!

For restless Narcissus, here is only ennui!

All calls to me and chains me to the luminous flesh Which is offered to me by the waters' dizzy peace!

How I lament your splendour fatal and pure, So languidly of me, encompassing fountain, Where my eyes have drawn up from a mortal azure, The same eyes and despairs of their astonished soul!

Profundity, profundity, dreams which see me, As they would see another life, Tell me, am I not the one you think that I am, For your own body do you crave?

Cease then, sombre spirits, this anxious piece of work Which you make in the soul that wakes; Seek not in yourselves, nor to catch out in the skies Misfortune's marvellous being: Finding in the fountain so delicious a body ...

Taking in with your glances this absolute victim, A captive do you make of the monster you love; In the wandering nets of your long silken lashes Its radiant grace makes your own again pensive; But flatter yourself not with the change of dominion.

This crystal is its true abode; The struggles the same as of love!

Know you not that the wave from your breath draws no worse ...

WORSE. Worse?...

Someone keeps saying​ Worse .​ .. O mockery!

Far echo is prompt to give back its oracle Of enchanted laughter, the rock crushes my heart, And the silence, by some miracle, Ceases!... speaks, comes again, on the face of the waters ...

Worse?...

A destiny worse!... You sound it, among the reeds, While again the winds take up my restless complaint!

Caves, which give back to me my soul more profoundly,

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There blows from out your darkness a voice that dies away ...

You murmur it to me, you branches!... O rumour Heartbreaking, and docile to the gusts from nowhere, Your faint gold is tossing, and plays with the augury ...

All mingle themselves in me, brutish divinities!

My secrets in the breeze sound their own disclosures, The rock laughs; the tree weeps; and by its charming voice, I even to the skies can then only lament Being easily one with eternal attractions!

Alas! between the arms to which the forests give birth, An ambiguous hour's tender glow exists ...

There, the last of the day, itself forms a bridegroom, Nude, on the pale place where the sad water lures, Delicious demon desirable and icy!

You are here, my smooth body of moonlight and dew, O form obedient and opposite my eyes!

They are comely, the gifts of my arms vast and vain!

My hands lingering, in the lovely gold grow weary Of calling this captive whom the leaves interlace; My heart throws forth to echoes the flash of names divine!...

But that your mouth is fair and this silent blasphemy!

O my likeness!... And yet more perfect than myself, Ephemeral immortal, so bright before my eyes, Limbs as pale as a pearl, and this fine silky hair, Must we scarcely know love, when the shadows descend, And the night already divides us, O Narcissus, And slides between us two like a blade cutting fruit!

Where are you?

Is my moan itself mortal?...

The murmur Which I breathe forth to teach to your lips, my double, Hastens but to blur and to trouble the limpid wave!...

You tremble!... But these words which I exhale on my knees Are but those of a soul still hesitant between us, Between this brow so pure and my heavy memory ...

I am so close to you that I can drink you in, O visage!... My thirst is that of a naked slave ...

Until this charming time I was strange to myself, And knew not how to love or be loved and made one!

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But to see you, dearest slave, responding to the least Of the shadows in my heart which vanish with regret, See on my brow the rage and fires of a secret, See, O marvellous, see! my mouth's finely nuanced Betrayal ... painted on the wave a flower of thought, And what occurrences sparkling in the eye!

I find here such a treasure of weakness and of pride, That no infant virgin in flight from a satyr, None! of clever escapes, of falls without commotion, None of the nymphs, no friend, nothing can entice me As you do on the wave, inexhaustible Self!...

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II

O fountain, my fountain, water coldly present, Sweet to pure animals, to humans obliging Who are tempted themselves at the bottom to find death, All is a dream to you, tranquil Sister of Fate!

Only in memory are you changed to a portent, Which likewise ceaselessly seeks out its fleeting face, As soon as you from sleep are ravished by the skies!

But pure as you are to the creatures you have seen, Wave, upon which the years pass over as the clouds, Yet in you all the same most things wish to be known, Stars, roses, the seasons, the body and its loves!

So clear, but so profound, a nymph who has always Touched lightly, and living to all those who approach, Nourished by some wisdom in the shelter of her rock, By shadows of the day which she paints beneath the woods, She understands forever the things that are past ...

O reflective presence, calm water which collects All the sombre treasure of fables and of leaves, The dead bird, the ripe fruit, as slowly they descend, And the rare glimmering of bright rings that are lost.

You consummate so solemnly their loss in yourself; But, upon the purity of your eternal face, Love passing and dying ...

When the scattered foliage Trembles, and starts to flee, moaning from all around, You see such sombre love there mingled with the storm, The lover hot and hard taking the pale beloved, Vanquishing the soul ... And you know with what sweetness The potent hand passes through the thickness of hair Whose tresses lie scattered upon the precious nape, To rest there, sensing its own strength and mystery; It calls at the shoulder and reigns over the flesh.

Then the eyes shut off from the breath of eternity Seeing only the blood which gilds their lowered lids; Redoubtable crimson to obscure the lights

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Of a couple adrift who have mingled, and lied.

They groan ... The Earth itself seems softly to summon These great faltering bodies, who struggle mouth to mouth, And who, daring to make of virgin sands their bed, Will compose out of their love a monster that dies ...

Their breaths can make no more than a happy murmur, The soul thinks it breathes in the soul so close to it, But you know better than I, venerable fountain, What fruits are always formed of these enchanted moments!

For, no sooner are hearts at peace and contented As an ardent union expires in delights, Than you mirror the spite of lovers when parted, You see the days dawning which are shot through with lies, And born countless evils too tenderly conceived!

All too soon, my wise wave, unfaithful and the same, Time leads these lunatics who believed that they loved To repeat to your reeds the deepest of their sighs!

Towards you, their sad steps follow their memories ...

To your banks, by shadows and by weakness overwhelmed, Bedazzled by a sky whose beauty still can wound So much it guards the brightness of their loveliest days, They go only to find their lost goods all entombed ...

«This place in the shadow was tranquil and our own!»

«The other loved this cypress, each other's heart's say», «And from here, we can savour the breath of the sea!»

Alas! the very rose is bitter in the air ...

Less bitter the perfumes of the smoke cloud supreme Abandoned to the wind by the leaves that are burnt!...

They inhale this same wind, walking without knowing, Trampling underfoot the daytime of their despair ...

O walk slowly, swiftly, and resemble the thoughts Which speak as they circle the heads of the insane!

The caress and the kill in their hands hesitate, Their heart, which thinks it breaks at each bend of the road, Struggles, and for itself gains the hope to which it clings.

But their lost spirits race through this labyrinth of now Where the one goes astray who has cursed at the sun!

Their insane solitude, which is equal to sleep, Fills and beguiles the absence; and their innermost ear Everywhere hears a voice that is nowhere the same.

Nothing then can dissipate their absolute dreams;

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The sun is as nothing against that which is no more!

But they trail in the gold their dry and doleful eyes, They are conscious of the tears defending their darkness Dearer to them always than all the fires of day!

And in this body hiding every mark of the love Which is bitterly borne by the soul that was happy, Burns a secret kiss which is furiously returned ...

But me, loved by Narcissus, I am not curious Except of my own essence; Another is no more than a mysterious heart, Another only absence.

O sovereign good, dear body, I have nothing but you!

The loveliest of mortals can love only himself ...

Smooth and golden, is it an idol most holy, With all the forest that is wasting away, assumed, And set amid the living blue with so many birds?

Is it a gift most divine which we owe the waters, Who of a day that dies can make no lovelier use Than render to my eyes the honour of my face?

Come to birth then between us whom the light unites The grace and the silence of an infinite exchange!

I salute you, child of my soul and of the wave, Dear treasure of a mirror which divides the world!

My tenderness comes to drink, and is drunk to see A longing in oneself to test one's own power!

O that is all my hopes, that you are just like me!

But the fragility you make inviolable, You are nothing but light, the adorable half Of a love too alike for a feeble friendship!

Alas! the same nymph it is who parted our charms!

What can I hope from you other than vain alarms?

They are sweet the perils which we ruinously choose!

One surprises oneself and by oneself is seized, Our hands are intertwined, our pains annul each other's, Our prolonged silences teach to us their own dreams, The same night when in tears they confound our closed eyes, And our arms close again on the very same sobs Embracing a like heart, ready to melt with its love ...

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Quit at last the silence, dare at last to respond, Lovely and cruel Narcissus, inaccessible child, All adorned with my treasures which the nymph forbids ...

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III ... This body so pure, does it know how it charms me?

From what profound depth do you dream of instructing, Occupant of the abyss, so specious a guest Of a dark sky here below hurled down from the heavens?...

O the cool ornament of my sad tendency That a smile so very close, and full of confidence, When ready on my lips sees a shadow of danger Until I fear to act upon so strange a longing!

What breath comes on the wave to offer your cold rose!...

I love ... I love!...​ And how then to love something other Than oneself?...

Only you, my body, my dear body, I love you, unique object that defends me from death! .

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Form then, you on my lip, and me, in my silence, A prayer to the gods who are moved by so much love That upon its crimson slope they hold back the day!...

Do it, happy Masters, Fathers of righteous frauds, Say that a glimmer of rose or of emerald Which from dreams of evening your sceptre revives again, Pure, and all alike to the spirit's purity, Waits, in the breast of heaven, that you live and want, Near to me, my beloved, to choose a bed of leaves, Come trembling from the flank of the cold-hearted nymph, And not quitting my eyes, not ceasing to be me, Offer me your form so fresh, and that skin so bright ...

Oh! to grasp you at last!... To take that calm torso More pure than a woman's and not formed to give fruits ...

But, of a simple stone is the temple where I am, Where I live ... For I live on your avaricious lips!...

O my body, dear body, temple that divides me From my divinity, I would like to appease Your mouth ... And no sooner done, I shatter, with my kiss, What little we defend of extreme existence, This tremulous, fragile, and respectful distance Between myself and the wave, and my soul, and the gods!...

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Farewell ... Sense you tremble a thousand drifting farewells?

Soon the shudder comes to disorder the shadows!

The blind tree to the tree spreads out its sombre limbs, And fearfully searches for the tree that disappears ...

My soul likewise loses its way in its own forest, Where the power escapes into its supreme forms ...

The soul, the dark-eyed soul, touches the same darkness, There it becomes immense and encounters nothing ...

Between death and oneself, what regard is one's own!

Gods! of the noble day, the pale and fond remains Go with days expended to join their grievous fate; It is deep in the abysm of profound memory!

Alas! wretched body, it is time to unite ...

You lean over ... You kiss. Tremble in all your being!

The elusory love you came promising me Passes, and with a shudder, breaks Narcissus, and flees ...

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THE PROPHETESS

​To Pierre Louÿs.

Haec effata silet; pallor simul occupat ora.

VIRGIL, AEN., IV.

THE Prophetess breathing out flame From nostrils toughened by incense, Drunkenly, gasping, shrieks!... the soul Fearful, and the sides bellowing!

Pale, bitten to the very depth, And the eye rolled up till it hangs At the highest point of horror, The look which has emptied her mask Is wrenched living from the basin, From the smoke-fumes, from the frenzy!

On the wall, her crazy shadow Where a major demon holds sway, Amongst the odorous tumult Lavishes a phantom swimmer, Whose ecstasy made gigantic, Breaking the calmness of the room, If her mad bray tardily comes, Will mimic her dark possession, Hasten the gods, force the spasms To a future consummation!

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The martyr in an icy sweat, Her fingers clutching at themselves, Rages atop the shaking frame Of a snake-encircled tripod: - Ah! cursed!... What evil I suffer!

My whole nature is an abyss!

Alas! Half-open to spirits, I have lost my own mystery!...

Adulterous Intelligence Controls a body that it knows!

Cruel gift! Tainted Master, cease Quick, quick, O heavenly ferment, To feign a futile pregnancy In this womb without a lover!

Make an end to this ghastly scene!

See my whole body's obscene bow Drawn back to breaking point to shoot, As its arrow most infamous, Implacably skyward the soul Which my breast can no more contain!

Who speaks to me, as in my stead?

What echo answers me: You lie!

Who enlightens me?... Who blasphemes?

And who, with these slavering words, Whose sharp fragments rip at my tongue, Makes it loosen such an harangue To quell the spiteful lisping cries Which chew and plot the disorder Of a mouth that wants to bite back And amend its on confessions?

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God! I know in myself no crime But that of having scarcely lived!...

But if you take me for victim On a vanquished body's altar Where you stretch out a monster, kill This monster, and the beast laid low, The neck cut through, the head produced By hairs that drag at the temples, Permit this feeblest of lamps To strike the whole night to marble!

All right then, by this wandering Lifeless, stray, and unending moon, May seas be suspended, the wave Maintained at its eternal crest!

That humans be made like statues, The hearts frozen, the souls destroyed, And by my petrifying glance, Let a multitude of their words Harden in a crowd of idols Mute with foolishness and with pride!

But! What!... To become the viper Whose undulating motive force Takes by surprise flesh which despairs Of its multitude of sections!...

To resume a senseless struggle!...

Far rather then turn back your thought To joy that is fled, and return, O memory, to that magic Which did not draw its energy From other mysteries than yours!

*

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My dear body... Preferent form, Its coolness one which never could Quench the thirst of Aphrodite, Darkness intact, tender summits, Your inexpressible divides Of clay into sentient isles, Soft substance of my destiny, In what agreement we once lived, Before the gift born of the foam Had made of you this corpselike thing!

You, my shoulder, where gold makes play Within a fountain's blackest depths, I loved to put my cheek to you Melting into its softest self!...

Or, to my nostrils lifted up, Opening on far distant seas, The hands full of their living breasts, Between the fair curve of my arms My abyss drank from the immense Profoundness offered by the winds!

Alas! O roses, every lyre Contains its own modulation!

One night, in sad delirium My constellation came in view!

The temple is changed to the cave, And the storm of dreams comes between The same sky which had been so fair!

I must groan, am forced to attain I know not what ecstasy, bind My hair with a fragment of cloth!

*

80

They have my blue stigmata known Appearing on my meagre skin; They dulled my senses with their herbs Woolly as a flock of sheep; They have, for a live amulet, Touched the flesh of my heaving breast Under its snakelike ornaments; Dizzy, drunk upon acrid fumes, They have, to the murmur of neumes, Subterranean honours paid.

What have I done to be condemned Pure, to these odious rites?

The sombre carcass of an ass Would serve the gods as well for hive!

But a virgin consecrated, A conch-shell nacreous and new Owing to the divinity Only silence and sacrifice, And that intimate violence Which virginity does itself!

Why then, Creatrix Powerful, Author of living mysteries, In this virgin for a matrix, Sow the marvels of wickedness!

Are these the gifts you give to me?

Think you, that when the cord is snapped Sounds gush forth more beautifully?

Your plectrum has my body struck, But you leave it with no more force Than that which sounds from out a tomb!

*

81

Be clement, without oracles!

Employ the magic of your hands, Made caresses by miracles, Take back the superhuman gifts!

In vain do you communicate To our feeble stems, these unique Upheavals which your splendour shows!

Calm waters more transparent are Than any storm's relationship With the confusion of the deeps!

Enough, the light of the divine Is not the dreadful lightning-flash Which forestalls us and seeks us out As does a dream's cruel clarity!

It shines forth!... Us it will instruct!...

No!... Solitude comes but to gleam In the immense wound of the air Where no pallid architecture, But an agonising rupture Imprints on us pure deserts!

Do not then, universal hands, Draw from out my thunderous brow Some scintillating sparks supreme!

These are the same games fortune plays!

The past, the future are brothers And in their contrasting faces A single head turns pale to see Wherever it looks nothing more Than the same wild absence of isles More lovely than forgetfulness.

*

82

Dark witnesses of so much light Do not seek more... Weep then, my eyes!...

O tears which spring from a first cause Too deeply in the heavens set!...

Never a bitterer demand!...

But the eye which is the strongest Must on darkness nourish itself!...

Maintaining thus our race dismayed, The hopelessness of distances Gives us sufficient time to die!

Listen, my soul, hear these rivers!

What cavernous grottoes are here?

Is it my blood?... Are they the fresh Murmuring of merciless waves?

My secrets herald their new dawns!

Sad bronzes, my sounding temples, What say you of the coming time!

Strike down, strike down, from out the rock, Abolish the hour most near...

My two natures will soon be one!

O formidably ascended, And on such terrifying rungs, I sense in the tree of my life The death climbing up from my heels!

Along my whole shivering thread, The moist finger of the spinner Traces out an atrocious will!

And sob by sob the crisis mounts Even to my nape where it breaks A peak of voluptuousness!

*

83

Ah! shatter the living portals!

Demolish all the useless seals, Thick flock of appalling terrors, Bristling with incandescent sparks!

Arise from the mournful stables Where my blacknesses nurtured you With their fabulous abundance!

Rise up, on dreams too over gorged, O thorny and so fuzzy hoard, And come to fume in the gold, Fleece!

* So that, always more tormented, Her wits astray, with groan and howl The prophetess has been stirred up By the breath of the molten gold.

But at last heaven intervenes!

The ear of the smiling pontiff Makes venture into the future: An holy expectation leans, And a voice that is white and new Escapes the impure body.

* Honour of Men, Holy LANGUAGE, Speech prophetic and remedy, Beautiful chains accepted by The god straying into the flesh, Inspiration, generousness!

Here speaking then is Wisdom's self And sounding this majestic Voice Which when it sounds is recognised To be no more a human voice So much as the waves and the woods!

*

84

THE SYLPH

NOT seen not known I am the perfume Living and gone On the wind borne!

Not seen not known, Chance or design?

But now just come The task is done!

Not read not contained?

For the best minds What promised mistakes!

Not seen not known, A bare breast in time Between two chemises!

85

THE IMPLICATION

O CURVES, complexities, Illusive secrets, Is there art more tender Than this slow process?

I know where I go, I want to guide you, My awkward design Will not injure you...

(Although agreeable To pride expanding, So much liberty Is disconcerting!)

O Curves, complexities, Illusive secrets, I needs must await The word most tender.

86

THE UNDEAD

HUMBLY, tenderly, upon the charming tomb, Upon the insentient stone, Of shadows, abandonments, generous love made, Your weary grace arrayed, I die, I die upon you, I sink exhausted down, But at grief's lowest ebb to the sepulchre come, Whose enclosed plot of earth offers me some relief, This semblance of death, who has come back to life, Shudders, opens her eyes, which light on my remorse, And wrests from me always another new death More precious than any life.

87

SKETCH OF A SERPENT ​To Henri GhÊon.

ABOUT the tree, the breeze placates The viper whose skin I have donned; A smile, which discloses the tooth And illuminates its appetites, Around the Garden risks and roves, And my triangle of emerald Shoots out its thin divided tongue ...

Beast am I, but a beast most keen, Of which the venom although vile Leaves the wise hemlock well behind!

Sweet is the leisure of the times!

Tremble, mortals! I am most strong When my sufficiency not shown, I yawn and shatter inner strength!

The splendour of the sky incites This wriggle which is my disguise Of animal simplicity; Come to me thus, rash careless race!

I am resourceful and erect, Equal to your necessity!

O sun, O sun!... Brilliance at fault!

You who obscure death, O Sun, Beneath a blue and golden tent Where flowers consult only themselves; With impenetrable delights, You, my most proud of accomplices, And the highest of all my snares, You shield the heart from knowing that The universe is but a flaw In the purity of Non-being!

88

Powerful Sun, who sounds the call To being, and your attendant flames, You who from out the confines of sleep Deceptively paints the countryside, Stirrer up of those joyous ghosts That render subject to the eyes The obscure presence of the soul, Always to me the amusing lie You scatter upon the absolute, O king of darkness made of flame!

Lend to me your primitive warmth, Which comes where my icy sluggishness Muses upon some unhappiness According to my twisted nature ...

This charming place where quickened flesh Fell and mingled is to me most dear!

My fury, here, makes itself ripe; I counsel it and accumulate, I hear myself, and in my coils, My meditation murmuring ...

O Vanity! Premier Cause!

Wherewith the One who rules the Skies, In a voice that was the light itself Opened the spacious universe.

As weary of his pure show, God Himself shattered the obstacle To his perfect eternity; He had made the One who dissipates In consequences, his Principle, Among the stars, his Unity.

89

Heaven, his error! Time, his ruin!

And the animal abyss, yawning!...

In the beginning what a fall As glittering replaced nothingness!...

But, was not the first word of his Word, MYSELF!... The most superb of stars Spoke as had their mad creator, I am!... I will be!... I illumine The diminution of the divine By all the lights of the Seducer!

Radiant object of my hatred, You whom I have loved passionately, You whose duties in the inferno Gave to this lover that empire, Look at yourself within my darkness!

Before your image funereal, Pride of my own sombre mirror, Your disquiet was so profound That breathing out upon the clay Became one long sigh of despair!

In vain, have You, from out the mire, Fashioned these facile children, Who call to mind Your triumphant deeds By singing Your praise the livelong day!

No sooner shaped, no sooner breathing, Master Serpent lets out a hiss, The beautiful creatures You create!

Hello there, says he, newcomers!

You are still these stark naked men, O beasts so white and blissfully smug!

90

In that likeness detestable, You were made, and I detest you!

As I hate the Name who created So many imperfect prodigies!

I am the One who modifies, I alter the heart that trusts in me, With a touch sure and mysterious!...

We will change these malleable works, And these timid evasive snakes Into reptiles most furious!

My Infinite Intelligence Touches in the soul of humans An instrument of my vengeance That was put together by your hands!

And your disguised Paternity, Although, within its starry chamber, It does no more than the incense greet, However the excess of my charms Will ruin with distant alarms Disrupting plans omnipotent!

I go, I come, I slide, I plunge, I vanish within a pure heart!

Was there ever a breast so hard That had no power to lodge a dream!

Whomsoever you be, am not I That first light of complacency Within your soul, when it loves itself?

I am at the depth of your favour That inimitable savour Which you find nowhere but in yourself!

91

Eve, long ago, I did surprise, Amidst her very first musings, Her lips half-open to those spirits That arose from the soothing roses.

Thus this perfection appeared to me, Her flank vast and dappled with gold Fearing neither the sun nor man; All offered to the gaze of the air, The soul still stupid, and as though Perplexed at the threshold of the flesh.

O what a mass of beatitude, You are so beautiful, just prize For one who is all solicitude To the good and the greater minds!

So that your lips be by something seized Sufficient if it be by your sighs!

The purest are to the worst inclined, The hardest are the easiest bruised ...

Just so with me, you softened me, From whom arose the vampires!

Yes! From my perch in the foliage Reptile with ecstasies of a bird, However much my babbling Weaves with my cunning camouflage, I drink you in, O deaf lovely one!

Calmly, light, with my ponderous charms, Thus furtively I dominate, Eye burning in the gold for your fleece, Your nape enigmatic and replete With the secrets of your movement!

92

I have been present like a perfume, Like the aroma of an idea From which can be elucidated Only its own insidious depths!

And I have troubled you, naive one, O languidly persuaded flesh, Else how could I intimidate, As you tottered in the splendour!

Soon, I will be you, I wager, Already your shades of meaning change!

(Such superb simplicity Demands immense consideration!

The transparency of her glance, Foolishness, pride, felicity, Guards well the lovely citadel!

Know he created fortuity, And by the rarest of the arts, Wherewith to entice the pure heart; It is my strength, it is my aim, It is the means toward my end!)

Gold, of a most dazzling venom, Veins the flimsy systems of thought Wherein the idle and gentle Eve To these vague dangers pledges herself!

As underneath a burden of silk Trembles thus the skin of this prey Accustomed to the one azure!...

But the finest gauze my method knows, Nor the thread invisible and sure, Count as much as the web of my style!

93

Be gold, my tongue! be gold with the Gentlest words of which you know!

Allusions, fables, delicacies, A thousand chiselled silences, Use any means that will do her harm: Nothing that flatters not yet misleads To lose herself in my designs, Docile as the slopes returning To the depths of the blue fountains Streams that from the heavens descend!

O what prose without parallel, What of the mind have I not cast Within the downy labyrinth Of so magnificent an ear!

There, think I, nothing will be lost; All can sway a suspended heart!

A certain triumph! if my word, As a soul by a treasure obsessed, Like a bee round a corolla Stirs no more from the golden ear!

ÂŤNothing, I prompt her, is less sure Than the divinity of words, Eve! Living science bursts asunder The enormity of this ripe fruit!

Heed not the Being old and pure Who made the briefest bite accursed!

What if your mouth creates a dream, This thirst you dream of is the sap, Half the delight is yet to be, Eternity melts in the mouth, Eve!Âť

94

She drank in my throwaway words Which constituted a work most strange; Her glance, sometimes, losing an angel As to my branches it returned.

The most crafty of animals You mock at for his clumsiness, O treacherous and big with evils, Is only a voice amid the leaves!

- But serious our Eve remained As underneath the branch she listened!

«Dear Soul, say I, soft dwelling-place Of all forbidden ecstasy, Sense you not the sinuous love That I have from the Father filched?

I have it, this essence of Heaven, Its aftertaste more sweet than honey Organised so delicately ...

Take then this fruit ... Lift up your arm!

For gathering what you desire Your lovely hand was given you!»

What silence flutters in a lash!

But what breath in the sombre breast Gnawed by the shadow of the Tree!

The other is as a pistil bright!

-​ Whistle, whistle! ​to me it sang!

And I felt each numbered trembling, Along my subtle lash-like length, Of those coils that so encumber me: They rolled all the way from the beryl Of my crest, to the verge of peril!

95

Genius! O long impatience!

At the end, the time has arrived, As one small step to the new Science Leaps thus forth on these naked feet!

The marble aspires, the gold curves!

These fair roots of shade and of amber Tremble upon evolution's brink!...

It is faltering, the great urn, In which there goes evading consent The conspicuously taciturn!

Of pleasure that you yourself propose Yield, dear body, yield to the lures!

That your thirst for metamorphous Around about the Tree of Death Engenders there a range of poses!

Come without coming! form the steps As vaguely as the weight of roses ...

Dance, dear body ... Do not think!

Here delights themselves are causes Sufficient for the effect of things!...

O madly that I offer myself This infertile pleasure-seeking: See so fresh a back's long pure length Tremble with disobedience!...

Its essence already given up Of wisdom and of illusions, The whole Tree of Knowledge itself Is dishevelled with its visions, Tosses its great body which plunges Into the sun, and draws up the dream!

96

Tree, great Tree, Figure of the Heavens, Irresistible Tree among trees, Who from out the weakness of stones, Seeks after delicious juices, You who push through such labyrinths Whereby the darkness unanimous Will rise up to be lost in the blue Sapphire of eternal morning, Sweet loss, aroma or gentle breeze, Or as it were predestined dove,

O Singer, O secret drinker Of the deepest of precious stones, Cradle of the dreamy reptile Who disturbs Eve in her reveries, Great Being so restless to know, Who always, the better to see, Increases at the call of your heights, You who in purest gold raise up Your strong arms, your misty branches, Whatever, hollowed to the abyss,

You hold off somewhat infinity Which is only your development, And all that is from tomb to nest You in your total Knowledge sense!

But this old lover of failures, In the idle gold of parching suns, Comes in your branches to twist himself; His glance makes your treasure tremble.

He will shake down the fruits of death, Of despair and of disorder!

97

Fine serpent, reared in the blue, I whistle, with such delicacy, Offering to the glory of God The triumph of my unhappiness ...

Sufficient for me that in the skies, The immense hope of bitter fruits Drives crazy the sons of the mire ...

- That thirst which made you grow so great, To where the Being exalts the strange Omnipotence of Nothingness!

98

THE POMEGRANATES

HARD pomegranates forced open Yielding to your excess of seeds, I think of you as sovereign brows Sundered by your discoveries!

If the suns by you endured, O pomegranates ruptured thus, Have worked on you with so much pride To crack your ruby partitioning, And if the dry gold of your rind At the demand of such a power Bursts open in red gems of juice, This luminous tearing asunder Makes a soul to dream as had I On your secret architecture.

99

THE LOST WINE

I have, one day, standing by the Sea, (But I know no more beneath which skies), Cast, an offering to nothingness, What little I had of precious wine...

What willed your loss, o lost liqueur?

I obeyed perhaps promptings divined?

Perhaps from a source within my heart, Dreaming of blood, pouring the wine?

Its accustomed translucency After the rosy smoke had cleared Reclaimed the ocean's purity...

Lost was the wine, drunken the waves!...

I saw leap high in the bitter air Figures of the profoundest kind...

100

INTERIOR

A slave with speaking eyes and laden with soft chains Makes fresh my flower-vase, plunges in the next mirror, On a secret bed lavishes her pure fingers; She places a woman in the midst of these walls Who, wandering through my dreams with propriety, Passes before my eyes without breaking their absence, Just as the rays of the sun are passed through the lens, And sparing the apparatus of pure reason.

101

THE CEMETERY BY THE SEA

μη, φιλα ψυχα, ßιoν αθανατoν σπευδε, ταν δ εμπρακτoν αντλει μαχαναν​.

PINDAR, Pythian Odes, III.

THIS tranquil roof, now walked upon by doves, Shimmers between the pines, between the tombs; Impartial Midday builds there with its fires The sea, the sea, always recommencing!

O more than recompense after a thought This long look at the calmness of the gods!

What pure work of subtle glints consume Many a diamond of imperceptible foam, And what a peace appears to be conceived!

When over the abyss a sun reposes, Pure effects of an eternal cause, The Times scintillate and the Dream is to know.

Stable treasure, simple temple to Minerva, Expanse of calm, and visible reserve, Disdainful water, Eye in yourself containing So much of sleep beneath a veil of flame, O my silence!... Edifice in the soul, But thatched now with a thousand gold tiles, Roof!

102

Temple of Time, summed up in a single sigh, To this pure point I climb and grow accustomed, Surrounded by my prospect of the sea; And like my supreme offering to the gods, The serene scintillations sow the seed Of a sovereign disdain upon the heights.

Like the fruit that melts into enjoyment, Like the delight which replaces its absence In a mouth where its living form must die, I sense here my future dissolution, And the sky sings to the soul that is consumed The changing murmurs of the rumoured shore.

Beautiful sky, true sky, watch me as I change!

After so much of pride, after so much of strange Idle leisure, although full of power, I abandon myself to this brilliant space, Over the houses of the dead my shadow passes And pacifies me with its frail movement.

The soul exposed to the flames of the solstice, I find you acceptable, admirable justice Of the light which is armed so pitilessly!

I send you back pure to where you began: Look at yourself!... But to send back the light Supposes an equal half of mournful shadow.

O for myself, by myself, in me alone, Close to a heart, to the source of the poem, Between the blank page and the pure event, I wait for the echo of my grandeur within, Bitter, sombre and sonorous cistern, Sounding in the soul an always hollow future!

103

Do you know, feigned captive of the foliage, Gulf consuming this meagre maze of branches, Above my closed eyes, dazzling secrets, What body drags me to its sluggish end, What mind attracts me to this bony earth?

A spark there calls to mind my dead ones.

Closed, sacred, full of a fire without substance, Terrestrial fragment offered to the light, This place pleases me, ruled over by torches, Composed of gold, of stone and sombre trees, Where so much marble trembles over so much shadow; The faithful sea sleeps there upon my tombs!

Splendid bitch, keep the idolater at bay!

When all alone and with a shepherd's smile, I graze for long, o sheep mysterious, The white flock of my ever tranquil tombs, Keep well away from them the prudent doves, The futile dreams, the questions of the angels!

When once come here, the future is idleness.

The insect sounds the depth of his own dryness; All is burnt up, unmade, resolved by the air Into I do not know what severe essence...

Life is vast, being drunken on absence, And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.

The dead are too well hidden in this earth Which heats them through and dries their mystery.

Midday on high, Midday without motion In its own thought its own sufficiency...

Head complete in itself and perfect crown, I am in you the secret alteration.

104

You have only me in which to contain your fears!

My repentances, my doubts, my constraints Are the sole flaw in your great diamond...

But in their night weighed down by slabs of marble, A vague people mixed with the roots of trees Have already slowly taken up your option.

They are melted into a palpable absence, The reddish clay has drunk the pallid race, The gift of life has passed into the flowers!

Where are the familiar phrases of the dead, The personal art, the soul's singularity?

The larva crawls where tear-ducts once formed tears.

The piercing cries of young girls titillated, The eyes, the teeth, the eyelids moist with laughter, The charming breasts that liked to play with fire, The blood that shone in lips as they surrendered, The ultimate gifts, the fingers they defended, All goes under the earth and returns as play!

And you, great soul, do you hope for a dream That does not share the colours of the lie Which to eyes of flesh the wave and the gold make here?

Will you still sing when you are fire and air?

Come on! All things pass! My presence is most thin, Impatience for the Divine will die also!

Meagre immortality black and golden, Consolatrix with your hideous laurels, Who would make of death a maternal breast, The beautiful lie and the pious ruse!

Who does not know, and who does not refuse, The empty skull and the eternal laugh!

105

Fathers profound, o heads untenanted, Who beneath the weight of many a shovelful Become the earth and inhibit our steps, The true rodent, the worm irrefutable Is not for you who sleep under the slabs, He lives on life, he never quits my side!

Love of myself, perhaps, or is it hatred?

His secret tooth to me is so very close That all the names he goes by suit him well!

What matter! He sees, he wants, he dreams, he touches!

My flesh pleases him, and even on my couch, To this living creature I live to belong!

Zeno! Cruel Zeno! Zeno of Elea!

Have you transfixed me with this feathered shaft Which quivers, flies, and yet does not fly!

The sound gives me life and the arrow kills!

Ah! the sunlight... What a shadow-tortoise For the soul, Achilles immobile with his great steps!

No, no!... Arise! Into the new epoch!

Shatter, my body, this old mode of thought!

Drink in, my breast, the birth of the wind!

A freshness, given off by the sea, Gives me back my soul... O salty powers!

Let us run to the waves and be swept back alive!

Yes! Great sea gifted with all delirium, Panther skin and chlamyde shot through with Thousands and thousands of idols of the sun, Absolute hydra, drunk on the blue of your flesh, Writhing to bite at your own sparkling tail In a tumult more to silence akin,

106

The wind is rising!... We must endeavour to live!

The air forces open and closes my book, The daring wave powders and spurts from the rocks!

Fly away, pages so dazzlingly bright!

Break, waves! Break with your waters rejoicing This tranquil roof on which the jib-sails pecked!

107

SECRET ODE DOWNFALL superb, ending so soft, Forgetting the struggle, what delight To stretch out on the naked moss After the dance, the body smooth!

Never before a like such glow As these glimmerings of summertime Upon a brow sprinkled with sweat Which has no triumph to celebrate!

But by the Evening Twilight touched, This great body that did such things, That danced, that wore out Hercules, Is no more than a bank of roses!

Sleep then, under the starry paths, Conqueror so slowly scattered, Because the Hydra fit for heroes Is spread out to infinity...

O what Great Bear, what Bull, what Dog, What objects of tremendous conquest, When it is out of time's resources The soul imposes on formless space!

Ending supreme, glittering such That, past the monsters and the gods, Proclaims to the universe at large The great deeds that are in the Skies!

108

THE OARSMAN ​For AndrÊ Lebey.

HUNCHED against a great river, infinitely my oars Pull me with regret past a smiling countryside; Soul with its heavy hands, occupied with the skulls, Must the heavens give way to the knell of the slow blades.

Hard of heart, the eye ignores the beauties I strike, Leaving expanding circles around me on the stream, I want with great strokes to break the illustrious world Of leaves and of fire that I sing of in low tones.

Trees over which I pass, wide and naive ripples, Water painted with branches, and peace of the achieved, Rip them apart, my boat, impose on them a shape Which speeds to abolish this great calm from memory.

Never, charms of the day, never have your graces Suffered so from a rebel testing his own defence: But, as all the suns have drawn me out of childhood, I go back to the source where things cease to have a name.

In vain, the whole enormous and continuous nymph Impedes with her pure arms my exhausted limbs; I will shatter most slowly a thousand icy bonds And all the silvery strands of her naked power.

This noise of hidden waters, this stream surprisingly Places my golden days beneath a blindfold of silk; Nothing can more sightlessly erase an ancient joy Than a noise of equal flight and of no other change.

Under the curved bridges, the deep water carries me, Arches full of wind, of murmuring and of night, They hasten over a brow which they crush down with grief, But whose arrogant bone is harder than their gate.

Their night is long passing. Beneath them the soul lowers Its perceptible suns and its all too ready lids, When, by a movement which invests me with its stones, I am forced into disdain of so much pointless blue.

109

PALM

​ For Jeannie.

SCARCELY veiling the terrible Grace of its own brightness, An angel puts on my table The new bread, the settled milk; With the flicker of an eyelid It signs to me like a prayer That speaks to my inner vision: - Calm, calm, remain calm!

Know the weight of the palm-tree Bearing its own profusion!

For as much as the palm-tree bends Beneath its abundance of goods, Its figure is accomplished, The weight of its fruit are its bonds.

Admire the way it trembles, And like a slow-drawn fibre Which subdivides the moment, Can mediate matter-of-factly Between the pull of the earth And the weight of the firmament!

This fair arbiter moving Between shadows and the sun, Seems to be like a Sibyl In its wisdom and its sleep.

Rooted in one place always The broad palm never wearies Of greetings nor of farewells...

How noble it is, how tender!

How worthy to be awaiting Only the hand of the gods!

110

The light gold of its rustling Resounds at the touch of the air, And with a silken armour Powers the soul of the desert.

An imperishable voice Given up to the sandy wind Which seeds it with its grains, Serves in itself as oracle, And can profess the miracle That it sings of unhappiness.

Meanwhile of itself unaware Between the sand and the sky, Each day that shines forth again Makes for it a little honey.

Its sweetness is the measure Of that divine duration Which does not compute by days, But rather tends to conceal In its juice accumulating All the perfumes of love.

Sometimes if you should despair, If that adorable rigour In spite of your tears only works Under the shadow of languor, Do not accuse as a miser A Sage who can prepare So much of gold and authority: Through all the solemn sap A hope that is eternal Rises towards maturity!

111

Those days that to you seem empty And lost for the universe Have their own avaricious roots Working away in the desert.

A network of finest hairs Elected by the shadows Is programmed never to stop, Even in the bowels of the earth, Seeking for those deep waters Its peremptory summit demands.

Patience, patience, Patience amid all that blue!

Each atom of silence Is the chance of a ripe fruit!

There will come the happy surprise: A dove, a little breeze, A rustling more than sweet, The way that a woman leans, Will bring down that shower of rain Where we throw ourselves on our knees!

Let this generation waste, Palm!... irresistibly so!

In the dust let it be rolled On the fruits of the firmament!

You have not lost these hours Such lightness you inherit After such lovely abandonment; Like as to one who has thought And whose soul has been used up In accumulating its gifts!

112

PIÈCES DIVERSES DE TOUTE ÉPOQUE

SNOW

WHAT silence, struck from the simple sound of a spade!...

I waken myself, awaited by this fresh snow Which catches at the hollow of my cherished warmth.

My eyes meet with a day of a pallid harshness And my languorous flesh has fear of the innocence.

Oh! how many snowflakes, during my mild absence, Have the sombre heavens lost throughout the long night!

What pure desert from darkness fell without a sound Come to efface the features of the enchanted earth Beneath this vast naiveté dully augmented And the merging of a place without face without voice, Where the lost gaze rebuilds a few of the rooftops Which conceal their treasure of accustomed living Scarce offering up the prayer of a hazy smoke.

113

DISASTER

WHAT hour knocks on the ribs of the hull This great shadowy blow where cracks our doom?

What impalpable power comes rattling In our tackle with the bones of the dead?

Naked on the prow, the crashing torrents Wash away the odour of life and wine: The sea casts up and digs again the tombs, The same water hollows and fills the ravine.

Hideous man, in whom the heart capsizes, Strange drunkard led astray upon the sea Whose nausea concomitant with a ship Snatches from the soul a desire for hell, Absolute man, I tremble and calculate, Brain all too clear, capable of the moment Where, as a phenomenon in minuscule, Time breaks in the manner of an instrument ...

A curse upon the swine who rigged you out, Ark gone rotten with its swarming ballast!

In your blackest depths, all created things Beat on your dead wood as it drifts to the East ...

The abyss and I make up the one machine Which juggles with its scattered memories: I see my mother and my porcelain cups, The greasy slut in the musky door of bars; I see Christ at the yard-arm tied down fast!...

He dances to death, foundering with his own; His blood-red eye lights on me this device: A GREAT SHIP PERISHES COMPANY AND GOODS!...

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COLLOQUY (for two flutes) À Francis Poulenc, qui a fait chanter ce colloque.

A

FROM a languishing Rose Grief towards us inclines; You are no different In your silence subdued From this languishing bloom; It is dying for us ...

You seem like unto me To the one whose ear once Used to rest on my knees, To the one whose ear once Never listened to me; You seem like unto me To the other I loved: But with that ancient love, Her whole mouth was my own.

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B Why do you compare me To some withering rose?

Love has no power so Spontaneous and fresh ...

My gaze into your own Can find only your good: Myself laid bare I see!

My eyes soon will efface Your tears as they become A future memory!...

As your desire born That dies upon my bed And upon my lips which Will sweep away your mouth ...

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THE DISTRACTED ONE

DEIGN, Laura, to return with the season of rains, With your perfumed presence, and your shoulder that leans On my slow tenderness attentive to your step, Laura, such a beautiful look that does not look, Deign, head with those great eyes which to the heavens stray, While you walk in a dream, your feet doomed to the puddles Quench their shining mirrors with the mud all around, Deign, belovĂŠd, listen to the things that you say ...

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IMPLICATION II

MAD and spiteful Just like a bee My lip kisses The burning ear.

I love your frail Astonishment Wherein I mingle Naught of the lover.

What a surprise...

Your blood is humming.

It's me who gives Life to the breeze...

In your tresses Tender and wicked My soul is haunting That which I crave.

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HOUR

THE HOUR comes to me smiling become a siren: Lighting the whole of a day that I never saw: Will you dance a long time, Sunbeam, on the threshold Of the sombre and sovereign soul?

Here is THE HOUR, the thirst, the source and the siren.

For you, the past burns, HOUR for me assuaging; At last, splendour alone, O goods I have ravished, I love that which I am: my solitude is queen!

My demons most secret, freely subjugated Achieve in the gold of the same air where I saw A wisdom so pure with its lucid advice: My presence is wholly serene.

Here is the HOUR, the thirst, the source and the siren, Will you dance a long time, Sunbeam, on the threshold Of evening, before the dark eye of my sovereign night?

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THE CRUEL BIRD ...

THE cruel bird keeps me wakeful all the night With a sharp twinge of delight in which I hear Its voice addressing with a rage so tender A sky ablaze with stars until the morning.

You pierce the soul and fix the destiny Of a lost glance which may not be recovered; All of you that was you is changed to ashes, O voice too high, instinct of ecstasy...

The shadowy dawn is tracing out the face Of a fine day to me already nothing: One day the more is but an empty landscape, What is another day without your face?

No!... Towards the night my soul returning Declines the coming dawn and the youthful day.

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AT BREAK OF DAWN ...

AT Break of Dawn, before the heat, The tenderness of the colour Only just scattered on the world Surprises and wounds the sorrow.

O Night, through which I have suffered, Suffer this smile of the heavens And this immense flower offered On the brow of a gracious day.

Great offering of such roses, What evil might you not withstand And see reddening of such things With their promises returning?

I have seen so many false dreams In my darkness without slumber That I range between the untruths Which have the same force as the sun, Which I doubt of as I receive With distaste, or with desire, This very young day on the leaf Whose virginal gold might be grasped.

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EQUINOX Elegy ​To look ...

I alter ... Who flees me?... All its motionless leaves Overburden the tree I see ...

Its thick arms are weary of lulling my sibyls: My silence has wasted its voice.

My soul, if its hymn was like unto a fountain Which with all of its waters sings, Instead of deep water where a faraway stone Marks the tomb of many a bird.

On a simple bed of sand as fine as ashes Sleep the steps which I have mislaid, And I sense myself falling live under shadows By way of their traces confused.

I distinctly mislay Psyche the sleepwalker In the water's too pure veils Whose calm and whose time is disturbed by a bubble Which releases itself from this tomb.

To herself then, perhaps, She talks and She pardons, But concedes with her eyes tight shut, She flees faithful from me, and, tender, commits me To inanimate destinies.

She leaves in my heart her inexplicable loss, And this heart which beats without hope Disputes with Persephone Eurydice stung On the pure breast by the black snake ...

Sombre dying witness of our tender annals, O sun, you are just like our love, The invincible charm of infernal beaches Calls from shores from which none return.

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Autumn, transparency! O solitude enhanced By such sadness and liberty!

Each thing is bright to me when it has departed; That which is no more becomes clear.

While wherever I fasten my stony regard With the fixed and the hard word ÂŤWhy?Âť, A quivering dark, the shadow of an eyelid Flutters between myself and me ...

O what eternity of spontaneous absence Comes all at once to cut us short?...

A single falling leaf has divided the year With its light as air occurrence.

Towards me, the fiery rest, leaves feeble and dry, Race on with their fragile rumour, And you, pale Sun, with your last quiver of arrows, Pierce me with these times which must die ...

Yes, I wake myself at last, grasped by an autumn wind Which lifts up a flight red and sad; Such a purple panic of gold hordes amaze me That I am irked and that I exist!

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THE CARESS

MY warm hands, bathe them in Your own ... Nothing so calm As when in passing love Ripples a rustling palm.

They are to me all known, Your rings with oblong stones Setting that shiver up Which makes the eyelids close And sorrow spread out, so, Like polish on a slab, A caress that reaches Even melancholy.

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SONG TO MYSELF WHAT do you do? The lot.

Your value? I don't know, Prefigurements, attempts, Potency and disgust...

Your value? I don't know...

You want? Nothing, the lot.

What do you know? Ennui.

What can you do? I dream.

Dream in order to change Each daytime into night.

What do you know? I dream To change the day's ennui.

What do you want? My good.

What must you do? I learn, Look forward and discern But all to no avail.

What do you fear? The will.

Who are you? Nothing much!

Where do you go? To die.

What to do there? To cease, Be subject not again To fortune's fickle tricks.

Where do you go? To cease.

What to do there? Be dead.

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THE PHILOSOPHER AND ​THE YOUNG FATE THE Young Fate, one fine day, found her Philosopher: «Ah, she said, I will therefore know Of what fabric my being is made ...

On more than one I have the effect Of a person most obscure; Each mortal who has not the time To dream nor to plummet the depth, At the name alone I bear is soon made to jump.

When it is not pity, it is anger I arouse, And even among the better minds, If there's one who tolerates me, The rest regard it with contempt.

This class of person says that a real muse should cause No more puzzlement than a rose!

Which is breathed purely for pleasure.

But the love affairs are the most precious That long toil of soul and of desire Carry to their delicious ends.

For profound hearts it does not suffice With a look, and a kiss returned, So that one may more quickly snatch a brief adventure …

No!... The thing truly dear is enriched with your torments, Your eyes in tears see it as diamonds, The bitterest night makes the most tender painting.

It is why I guard myself and my charming secrets.

My heart requires force, and rejects you, Lovers Discouraged by the knots of my beautiful girdle.

My Father has prescribed: I belong to effort.

My darkness has made me the mistress of my fate, And reveals at last to none but the happy few This innocent ME who trembles at her shadow Even as the God of Love is weak at the knees.

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INDEED, of great desire I was the anxious work ...

But I am not in myself more mysterious Than the most simple amongst you ...

Mortals, you are flesh, recollection, forewarning; You were; you will be; you carry such an aspect: You are all things; you are nothing, Supports of the whole world and reeds that the air breaks, You LIVE ... What an astonishment!...

A mystery is all your good, And this secret in you is astonished by mine?

What are you, if you are not mystery?

A little dream upon the earth, A little love, hunger, thirst, which make up the steps Each takes without evading death, And you would share the pure destiny of the beasts If the Gods had not placed, as a potent last resort, In the intimate depth of your minds, The great gift of comprehending nothing of your fate.

«Who am I?» ask the day the living who awake And are put to right by the sun.

«Where go I?» says the mind who has sacrificed sleep, When night gathers him up into its own marvel.

The cleverest is still stung by the bee, In the lesser man's soul a serpent bites again; Even a fool is enriched with enigmas by death Which decks him and drapes him like a grave personage, Chill with such a secret as would keep him a slave.

COME ON!... If all was clear, all would to you seem vain!

Your ennui would people a universe without shade With an impassive life of souls without leaven.

But some such restlessness is a present divine.

The hope that in your eyes shines at a sombre threshold Can never find repose upon a world too sure; Of all your grandeurs the principle is obscure.

The most profound humans, not understood by themselves, From a certain dark night draw out their supreme goods And the most pure objects of their noble loves.

A tenebrous treasure makes the brightness of your days: A silence strangely enough is the source of poems.

Know then in yourself the su bstance of my discourse: From you I have taken the shadows which you feel.

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Who is lost in himself straightway finds me again.

In the darkness of life where the glance goes astray, Time is working, death is hatching, A Fate dreams there at a distance.

It is ME ... Endeavour to love this young rebel: «I am black, but I am comely» As the Beloved sings, in the Song of Solomon, And if I inspire some terror, Poem that I am, in those who might not follow me, What could be more speedy than to shut up a book?

It is thus one sets oneself free From these writings so clear one finds only oneself.»

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​ APPENDIX I THE VAIN DANCERS (1942)

THESE that are like unto shadowy flowers are come, Troupe divine and gentle wandering under clouds Which touch or create from a hint of moon... They are here Melodiously gliding through the lightened wood.

Of mallows and irises and dying roses Are the graces of night in their budding dances Which bestow on the wind the perfume of their fingers.

They become the azure and depth of the forest Where the feeble water glimmers in the shade, resting Like a pale treasure wet with everlasting dew From which emanates an immense silence... They are here Mysteriously gliding through the lightened wood.

Furtive as a flight of amiable untruths.

They trample upon the dreams of closed calyxes And their delicate arms with their sleepy actions Mingle, as if dreaming beneath friendly myrtles, The caresses of one with the other... Except one, Who puts off the rhythm and who flees the fountain, Goes, ravishing a thirst for mystery accomplished, To drink frail lily water where pure oblivion sleeps.

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SUMMER (1942)

​À Francis Vielé-Griffin.

SUMMER, rock of pure air, and you, blazing hive, O sea! Scattered into a thousand flies upon The tufts of a flesh as cool as from a pitcher, And even in the mouth where buzzes the blue sky.

And you, fiery dwelling-place, immense Space, dear Space Tranquil, where the tree steams and loses a few birds, Where infinitely breaks the murmur of the mass Of the sea, of the march and the troops of the waters, Weights of odours, great ripples from the happy races On the gulf which consumes and which mounts to the sun, Pure nests, sluices of grass, shadows of hollow waves, Cradle the child ravished in a fretful slumber.

In the skies there vainly thunders a blaze of matter, If it kindles the seas, if it consumes the mountains, If it pours forth upon life a torrent of light And has all the demons whinnying in our hearts, You, on the tender sand which the wave abandones, Where its power of tears loses all its diamonds, You relaxed with ennui at a world of wonders, Virgin deaf to clamours of eternal elements, You shut up in yourself, clasping your young bosom, Soul entirely in love with its own little night, Because these pure tumults, this mad star that forges The crude gold of events idiotic as noise,

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Make you kiss the breasts of your ephemeral being, Cherish this trifle of flesh like a young animal And victim and disdain of the bitter splendour Pamper the sweet pride of self-love like an evil Girl exposed to the gods which the Ocean spangles With foam that it snatches from mirrors of the sun, To universal games your mortal being prefers, All things of shadow and love, your island of sleep.

Meanwhile high heaven strikes down the human hour, Monster thirsting for time, immolating the future, The Sacrificer Sun rolls on and repossesses Day after day on its altars of azure sky‌ But the legs (of which the one is cool and released From the one more rosy), the shoulders, the hard breast, The arms that are mingling with the foamy cheek Are abandoned shining in the obscure bowl Where there filters loud sounds full of the beasts drawn up In the cages of leaves and the nets of the sea By the maritime mills and the rose-coloured huts Of day ‌ All the skin gilds the arbours of the air.

131

LITTLE THINGS BENEATH A PORTRAIT WHAT if I were placed in front of this effigy Quite unknown to myself, ignorant of my features, By such frightful wrinkles of anguish and energy I would recognise my torments and recognise myself.

UPON A FAN SOMETIMES caprice and at others indolence The ample fan between the soul and the friend Comes to dissipate what has been half-said With a gentle breeze that brings back the silence.

TO JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ who sent me such precious roses ...HERE is the door shut firm again Prison of roses from someone?...

The surprise and perfume mingle Make for me an enchanted room...

Alone and not, between these walls, In the air the purest of gifts Make sweetness and glory speechless...

I breathe here an other poet.

Madrid, Wednesday 21 of May 1924.

132

APPENDIX II FOR YOUR «SUPREME» BEECH-TREE ​To M. A. G. MOST noble Beech-tree, summer long, Held a bond-slave to such splendour, Here is your punishment prepared By a cold deceptive heaven.

Returned a hundredfold the crows, The winter whips and flays you bare; A wind whose breath blows over tombs Makes fall the fires of your torch!

Your brow, which hid the infinite, Is no more than a point of rest, On which the almost weightless nest For the lost eye a refuge makes!

All winter, the inactive gaze, Betrayed by the flawed window pane, Has sought in branches for the eggs Vainly forming a futile dream!

But - O Sadness of the season, Which wastes you as it wastes itself, You can know not of my reason Nor my hope in the Beech Supreme!

So much Grace and so much Beauty!

May it be that all is dying, France, where the least of nests remains Balanced upon a home so proud?

A thousand birds will sing in one Memory of frightful wreckage, When green again out of Verdun Saved, our illustrious language!

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THE LAST WORD HALT! HALT YOUR PROGRESS! CONQUEROR, AT THIS ​EXALTED MOMENT OF VICTORY. SET ASIDE A TIME OF

SILENCE AND ASK YOURSELF WHAT YOU SHOULD THINK AS YOU REACH THIS SUMMIT, WHAT YOU SHOULD THINK THAT WILL NOT BE WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE.

IT IS A VOW, A PLEDGE, AN IRREVERSIBLE ACT, A MONUMENT ​IN THE SOUL, AND LIKE UNTO A SOLEMN PRAYER, WHICH YOU OWE, TO THE DEAD AND TO THE LIVING, TO PRONOUNCE AND ESTABLISH, IN ORDER THAT THIS MOST NOBLE MOMENT OF SILENCE DOES NOT PERISH LIKE ANY OTHER.

SWEAR TO YOURSELF AND ENGRAVE IT WITHIN YOUR HEART: THAT THE DAY NEVER GLEAMS WHEN THE MEMORY OF THIS DAY OF VICTORY MAY BRING BACK A BITTERNESS AND A RECURRENCE OF HATRED TO THE PRESENT JOY: THAT NEVER WHEN RELIVING THAT DAY WHICH IS TODAY MAY THERE BE BROUGHT TO MIND THIS OPPRESSIVE WORD: TO WHAT GOOD?

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THE ANGEL A kind of an angel was sitting on the edge of a fountain. He gazed down at himself, and he saw Man, and in tears, and he was astonished in the extreme at the appearance in the bare waters of this prey to an infinite sorrow.

(Or as it were, there was a Sorrow in the shape of Man who could not find a cause in the clear sky.)

The figure that was his own, the sadness written there, seemed to him totally foreign.

An appearance so miserable interested, exercised, questioned in vain his marvellously pure spiritual substance.

- «O my Evil, ​said he, w ​ hat are you to me?»

He attempted to smile: but he cried. This disloyalty of his face confounded his perfect intelligence; and this so unusual look that he observed, an affection so accidental in his features, their expression so much at odds with the universality of his limpid knowledge, as mysteriously offending the unity.

- «I am not prone to tears, ​said he, ​nor likewise, have I ever been.»

The Movement of his Reason in the light of eternal readiness found an unknown question suspended his infallible operation, for the cause of sadness in our inexact natures does not arise as a question among absolute essences; - while, for us, every question is or will become sadness.

- «Who then is this one who loves so much that he is tormented? ​said he. I understand everything; and therefore, I can well see that I suffer. This face is truly my face; these tears, my tears... But nevertheless, I am not that power who sees through this face and these tears, and their cause, and who dissipates that cause, nor am I able to remit an imperceptible part of their duration?»

But these thoughts had beauty enough to produce and propagate in all the fullness of the sphere of thought, the similarities to respond, the contrasts to declare and to resound, and the miracle of the clarity incessantly to accomplish, and all the Ideas sparkling in the glow of each one amid the others, like the joy of those that are united in the crown of all knowledge, with nothing however that could be construed as a species of evil nor appeared thus to his flawless regard, nothing that could explain this distressed face and these tears that he saw through tears.

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- «So then I am of such purity, ​said he, a​ n Intelligence that can take in without effort all created things, without any of those returns which affect or distort them, that I may recognise nothing in this face bearing tears, in these eyes wherein the light with which they are composed seems to be waiting for the imminent moisture of their tears.»

- «And how may it be that I suffer in the process of this beautiful exploration that is by me, and that is of me, that in the end I see all that is, when I have knowledge of every thing, and that I may not suffer but from ignorance of any one of them?

«O my astonishment, ​said he, Countenance charming and sad, is there then something other than the light?»

And he questioned himself in the universe of his marvellously pure spiritual substance, where all the ideas lived equally distant between themselves and himself, and in such a perfection of their harmony and promptitude of their correspondence, that it could be said that he might vanish, and the system, glittering like a diadem, of their simultaneous necessity live on by itself alone in its sublime plenitude.

And during an eternity, he has not ceased from knowing and not understanding.

May 1945.