(Tr. 6)
* * * * *
--O these crowds, these crowds, and the misery and distress that
whips them like billows.
Monstrances, decorated with silk, towards the heaped up towns, in roofs
of glass and crystal, from the height of the sacerdotal choir, stretch
the cross of gothic ideas.
They obtrude themselves in the gold of clear Sundays--All Saints' day,
Christmas, Easter, and white Pentecosts. They obtrude themselves in the
gold and in the incense and in the fête of the great organ beating with
the flight of its storms.
The red capitals and vermillion vaults are a soul, in sunlight, living
in the old background and antique authoritarian mystery.
Yet, when the song and the naive, prismatic anthem ceases, a grief
of incense evaporated stamps itself on the golden tripods and brazen
altars.
And the stained glass windows, lofty with ages kneeling before Christ,
with their immobile popes and martyrs and heroes, seem to tremble at
the sound of a proud train passing through the town.
(Tr. 7)
Formerly--there was the errant, somnambulous life, across the mornings
and fabulous evening, when the right hand of God towards the blue
Canaans traced the golden road in the depth of the shadows.
Formerly--there was the enormous, exasperated life, fiercely hung on
the manes of stallions, suddenly, with great sparks from their hoofs,
and towards immense space immensely provoked.
Formerly--there was the ardent, evocative life; the white Cross of
heaven, the red Cross of hell advanced, to the splendor of iron armors,
each across blood, towards his victorious heaven.
Formerly--there was the foaming livid life, alive and dead, with
strokes of crime and tocsins, battle between them, of proscribers and
assassins, with splendid and mad death above them.
(Tr. 8)
The melancholy time has ornamented its hours like dead flowers; the
passing year has yellowed its days like dry leaves. The pale dawn is
seen by gloomy waters and the faces of evening have bled under the
arrows of the laughing, bleeding, mysterious wind.
(Tr. 9)
I know sad waters in which die the evenings; flowers which nobody
gathers fall there one by one.
(Tr. 10)
Yesterday the dawn was so pale over the peaceful meadows and
shavegrass; in the clear morning came a child to gather plants, leaning
on them his pure hands that gathered the asphodels.
Noon was heavy with storm and dismal with sunlight in the garden dead
of pride in its lethargic sleep of flowers and trees; the water was
hard to the eye like marble, the marble warm and clear like water, and
the child that came was comely, clad in purple and golden-hair, and
long one saw the peonies, one by one, draw their blood from the petals
at the passage of the fair child.
The child that came that evening was naked. He gathered roses in the
dusk, he sobbed at having come, he retreated before his shadow. It is
like him, naked, that my destiny has recognized itself.
(Tr. 11)
Goat's leaf grows under my May forest. The sun drops in gold through
the heavy gloom. A roe-buck stirs in the leaves he gathers. The breeze
in the frieze of birches passes from leaf to leaf.
The grasses are silvered in my May field. There the sun gleams like a
play of swords. A bee vibrates to the lilies of the valley in the lane
of tall grouped flowers, towards the bed of the stream. The breeze
sings in the frieze of the ash-trees.
(Tr. 12)
Where is the Marguerite, O gué, o gué, where is the Marguerite? She is
in her château, weary and tired at heart, She is in her hamlet, gay
and childish at heart. She is in her grave, let us gather there the
lily-of-the-valley, O gué, the Marguerite.
(Tr. 13)
Where are our beloved ones? They are in the grave; they are happier in
a fairer sojourn.
(Tr. 14)
Of what use is beauty? Its use is to go in earth, to be eaten by worms,
to be eaten by worms....
(Tr. 15)
Do you not feel in you the opulence of being only for yourself
beautiful, O Sea, and of being yourself?
(Tr. 17)
Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words
issue; man passes there through forests of symbols watching him with
friendly gaze.
Like long echoes blended in distance to deep, dim unity, vast as night
and clear as day, the perfumes, colors and sounds answer each other.
(Tr. 18)
The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.
To fly yonder! I feel that the birds are drunk
At being among the unknown foam and the heavens....
An autumn strewn with stains of redness....
And you were the sobbing whiteness of lilies....
I bring you the child of an Idumean night....
His neck will shake off this white agony....
(Tr. 19)
The dream, in a heliotrope robe, and her thought on her fingers, with
loosened girdle, passes, lightly grazing souls with her cloud train, to
the extinct rhythm of a music of other times.
(Tr. 20)
In the lingering fragrance of an evening of the last days.
(Tr. 21)
The roses of the west shed their leaves on the stream; and, in the pale
emotion of the falling evening, is evoked an autumnal park where, on a
bench, dreams my youth, already sober as a widow.
(Tr. 22)
Chastely you walked in the robe of your soul, which desire followed
like a tamed faun; I breathed through the evening, O purity, my dream
enveloped in your womanly veils.
(Tr. 23)
Fair verses where the fluid sense is loosened like the hair of Ophelia
under the water. Silent verses, without rhythm or trammels, where
noiselessly the rhyme slips like an oar. Verses of an old thin stuff,
impalpable as sound or cloud. Verses of autumnal evenings bewitching
the hours with the feminine rite of minor syllables. Verses of evenings
of loves enervated with verbena, where, exquisitely, the soul hardly
feels a caress.
(Tr. 24)
In the splendor of violet moonlights.
(Tr. 25)
Then from the depths and holy night, as a young sun springs from abysms
of the sea, white, letting stream from shoulders to back her hair where
pale hyacinths swim, a woman rises.
(Tr. 26)
If you clasp only chimerae, if you drink the intoxication of delusive
wine, what matter! The sun dies, the imaginary crowd is dead, but the
world subsists in your own soul: See! the days are faded like brief
roses, but your word has created the mirage in which you live.
(Tr. 27)