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Title: The Love Poems
(From Les Heures claires, Les Heures d'après-midi, Les Heures du Soir)
Author: Émile Verhaeren
Translator: Frank Stuart Flint
Release Date: April 24, 2014 [EBook #45470]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOVE POEMS ***
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THE LOVE POEMS OF EMILE VERHAEREN
TRANSLATED BY
F. S. FLINT
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
1916
A CELLE QUI VIT A MES CÔTÉS
CONTENTS
THE SHINING HOURS
I. O the splendour of our joy
II. Although we saw this bright garden
III. This barbaric capital, whereon monsters writhe
IV. The sky has unfolded into night
V. Each hour I brood upon your goodness
VI. Sometimes you wear the kindly grace
VII. Oh! let the passing hand
VIII. As in the simple ages
IX. Young and kindly spring
X. Come with slow steps
XI. How readily delight is aroused in her
XII. At the time when I had long suffered
XIII. And what matters the wherefores
XIV. In my dreams, I sometimes pair you
XV. I dedicate to your tears
XVI. I drown my entire soul in your two eyes
XVII. To love with our eyes
XVIII. In the garden of our love
XIX. May your bright eyes, your eyes of summer
XX. Tell me, my simple and tranquil sweetheart
XXI. During those hours wherein we are lost
XXII. Oh! this happiness, sometimes so rare
XXIII. Let us, in our love and ardour
XXIV. So soon as our lips touch
XXV. To prevent the escape of any part of us
XXVI. Although autumn this evening
XXVII. The gift of the body when the soul is given
XXVIII. Was there in us one fondness
XXIX. The lovely garden blossoming with flames
XXX. If it should ever happen that
THE HOURS OF AFTERNOON
I. Step by step, day by day
II. Roses of June, you the fairest
III. If other flowers adorn the house
IV. The darkness is lustral
V. I bring you this evening, as an offering
VI. Let us both sit down on the old worm-eaten bench
VII. Gently, more gently still
VIII. In the house chosen by our love
IX. The pleasant task with the window open
X. In the depth of our love dwells all faith
XI. Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars
XII. This is the holy hour when the lamp is lit
XIII. The dead kisses of departed years
XIV. For fifteen years
XV. I thought our joy benumbed for ever
XVI. Everything that lives about us
XVII. Because you came one day
XVIII. On days of fresh and tranquil health
XIX. Out of the groves of sleep I came
XX. Alas! when the lead of illness
XXI. Our bright garden is health itself
XXII. It was June in the garden
XXIII. The gift of yourself
XXIV. Oh! the calm summer garden where nothing moves!
XXV. As with others, an hour has its ill-humour
XXVI. The golden barks of lovely summer
XXVII. Ardour of senses, ardour of hearts
XXVIII. The still beauty of summer evenings
XXIX. You said to me, one evening
XXX. "Hours of bright morning"
THE HOURS OF EVENING
I. Dainty flowers, like a froth of foam
II. If it were true that a garden flower
III. The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead
IV. Draw up your chair near mine
V. Be once more merciful and cheering to us, light
VI. Alas! the days of the crimson phlox
VII. The evening falls, the moon is golden
VIII. When your hand
IX. And now that the lofty leaves have fallen
X. When the starry sky covers our dwelling
XI. With the same love that you were for me
XII. The flowers of bright welcome
XIII. When the fine snow with its sparkling grains
XIV. If fate has saved us from commonplace errors
XV. No, my heart has never tired of you
XVI. How happy we are still
XVII. Shall we suffer, alas! the dead weight of the years
XVIII. The small happenings, the thousand nothings
XIX. Come even to our threshold
XX. When our bright garden was gay
XXI. With my old hands lifted to your forehead
XXII. If our hearts have burned
XXIII. In this rugged winter
XXIV. Perhaps, when my last day comes
XXV. Oh! how gentle are your hands
XXVI. When you have closed my eyes to the light
THE SHINING HOURS
I
O the splendour of our joy, woven of gold in the
silken air!
Here is our pleasant house and its airy gables,
and the garden and the orchard.
Here is the bench beneath the apple-trees, whence
the white spring is shed in slow, caressing
petals.
Here flights of luminous wood-pigeons, like
harbingers, soar in the clear sky of the
countryside.
Here, kisses fallen upon earth from the mouth of
the frail azure, are two blue ponds, simple and
pure, artlessly bordered with involuntary flowers.
O the splendour of our joy and of ourselves in
this garden where we live upon our emblems.
II
Although we saw this bright garden, wherein we
pass silently, flower before our eyes, it is
rather in us that grows the pleasantest and
fairest garden in the world.
For we live all the flowers, all the plants and
all the grasses in our laughter and our tears of
pure and calm happiness.
For we live all the transparencies of the blue
pond that reflects the rich growths of the golden
roses and the great vermilion lilies, sun-lips
and mouths.
For we live all joy, thrown out in the cries
of festival and spring of our avowals, wherein
heartfelt and uplifting words sing side by side.
Oh! is it not indeed in us that grows the
pleasantest and the gladdest garden in the world?
III
This barbaric capital, whereon monsters writhe,
soldered together by the might of claw and tooth,
in a mad whirl of blood, of fiery cries, of
wounds, and of jaws that bite and bite again,
This was myself before you were mine, you who are
new and old, and who, from the depths of your
eternity, came to me with passion and kindness in
your hands.
I feel the same deep, deep things sleeping in you
as in me, and our thirst for remembrance drink up
the echo in which our pasts answer each to each.
Our eyes must have wept at the same hours,
without our knowing, during childhood, have had
the same terrors, the same happinesses, the same
flashes of trust;
For I am bound to you by the unknown that watched
me of old down the avenues through which my
adventurous life passed; and, indeed, if I had
looked more closely, I might have seen, long ago,
within its eyes your own eyes open.
IV
The sky has unfolded into night, and the moon
seems to watch over the sleeping silence.
All is so pure and clear; all is so pure and so
pale in the air and on the lakes of the friendly
countryside, that there is anguish in the fall
from a reed of a drop of water, that tinkles and
then is silent in the water.
But I have your hands between mine and your
steadfast eyes that hold me so gently with their
earnestness; and I feel that you are so much at
peace with everything that nothing, not even a
fleeting suspicion of fear, will overcast, be it
but for a moment, the holy trust that sleeps in
us as an infant rests.
V
Each hour I brood upon your goodness, so simple
in its depth, I lose myself in prayers to you.
I came so late towards the gentleness of your
eyes, and from so far towards your two hands
stretched out quietly over the wide spaces.
I had in me so much stubborn rust that gnawed my
confidence with its ravenous teeth.
I was so heavy, was so tired, I was so old with
misgiving.
I was so heavy, I was so tired of the vain road
of all my footsteps.
I deserved so little the wondrous joy of seeing
your feet illuminate my path that I am still
trembling and almost in tears, and humble, for
ever and ever, before my happiness.
VI
Sometimes you wear the kindly grace of the garden
in early morning that, quiet and winding, unfolds
in the blue distances its pleasant paths, curved
like the necks of swans.
And, at other times, you are for me the bright
thrill of the swift, exalting wind that passes
with its lightning fingers through the watery
mane of the white pond.
At the good touch of your two hands, I feel as
though leaves were caressing me lightly; and,
when midday burns the garden, the shadows at once
gather up the dear words with which your being
trembled.
Thus, thanks to you, each moment seems to pass in
me divinely; so, at the hour of wan night, when
you hide within yourself, shutting your eyes, you
feel my gentle, devout gaze, humbler and longer
than a prayer, thank yours beneath your closed
eyelids.
VII
Oh! let the passing hand knock with its futile
fingers on the door; our hour is so unique, and
the rest--what matters the rest with its futile
fingers?
Let dismal, tiresome joy keep to the road and
pass on with its rattles in its hand.
Let laughter swell and clatter and die away; let
the crowd pass with its thousands of voices.
The moment is so lovely with light in the garden
about us; the moment is so rare with virgin light
in our heart deep down in us.
Everything tells us to expect nothing more from
that which comes or passes, with tired songs and
weary arms, on the roads,
And to remain the meek who bless the day, even
when night is before us barricaded with darkness,
loving in ourselves above all else the idea that,
gently, we conceive of our love.
VIII
As in the simple ages, I have given you my heart,
like a wide-spreading flower that opens pure and
lovely in the dewy hours; within its moist petals
my lips have rested.
The flower, I gathered it with fingers of flame;
say nothing to it: for all words are perilous; it
is through the eyes that soul listens to soul.
The flower that is my heart and my avowal
confides in all simplicity to your lips that it
is loyal, bright and good, and that we trust in
virgin love as a child trusts in God.
Leave wit to flower on the hills in freakish
paths of vanity; and let us give a simple welcome
to the sincerity that holds our two true hearts
within its crystalline hands;
Nothing is so lovely as a confession of souls
one to the other, in the evening, when the flame
of the uncountable diamonds burns like so many
silent eyes the silence of the firmaments.
IX
Young and kindly spring who clothes our garden
with beauty makes lucid our voices and words, and
steeps them in his limpidity.
The breeze and the lips of the leaves babble,
and slowly shed in us the syllables of their
brightness.
But the best in us turns away and flees material
words; a mute and mild and simple rapture, better
than all speech, moors our happiness to its true
heaven:
The rapture of your soul, kneeling in all
simplicity before mine, and of my soul, kneeling
in gentleness before yours.
X
Come with slow steps and sit near the gardenbed,
whose flowers of tranquil light are shut by
evening; let the great night filter through you:
we are too happy for our prayer to be disturbed
by its sea of dread.
Above, the pure crystal of the stars is lit up;
behold the firmament clearer and more translucent
than a blue pond or the stained-glass window
in an apse; and then behold heaven that gazes
through.
The thousand voices of the vast mystery speak
around you; the thousand laws of all nature are
in movement about you; the silver bows of the
invisible take your soul and its fervour for
target,
But you are not afraid, oh! simple heart, you
are not afraid, since your faith is that the
whole earth works in harmony with that love that
brought forth in you life and its mystery.
Clasp then your hands tranquilly, and adore
gently; a great counsel of purity floats like
a strange dawn beneath the midnights of the
firmament.
XI
How readily delight is aroused in her, with her
eyes of fiery ecstasy, she who is gentle and
resigned before life in so simple a fashion.
This evening, how a look surprised her fervour
and a word transported her to the pure garden of
gladness, where she was at once both queen and
servant.
Humble of herself, but aglow with our two selves,
she vied with me in kneeling to gather the
wondrous happiness that overflowed mutually from
our hearts.
We listened to the dying down in us of the
violence of the exalting love imprisoned in our
arms, and to the living silence that said words
we did not know.
XII
At the time when I had long suffered and the
hours were snares to me, you appeared to me as
the welcoming light that shines from the windows
on to the snow in the depths of winter evenings.
The brightness of your hospitable soul touched my
heart lightly without wounding it, like a hand of
tranquil warmth.
Then came a holy trust, and an open heart, and
affection, and the union at last of our two
loving hands, one evening of clear understanding
and of gentle calm.
Since then, although summer has followed frost
both in ourselves and beneath the sky whose
eternal flames deck with gold all the paths of
our thoughts;
And although our love has become an immense
flower, springing from proud desire, that ever
begins anew within our heart, to grow yet better;
I still look back on the small light that was
sweet to me, the first.
XIII
And what matters the wherefores and the reasons,
and who we were and who we are; all doubt is dead
in this garden of blossoms that opens up in us
and about us, so far from men.
I do not argue, and do not desire to know, and
nothing will disturb what is but mystery and
gentle raptures and involuntary fervour and
tranquil soaring towards our heaven of hope.
I feel your brightness before understanding that
you are so; and it is my gladness, infinitely, to
perceive myself thus gently loving without asking
why your voice calls me.
Let us be simple and good--and day be minister of
light and affection to us; and let them say that
life is not made for a love like ours.
XIV
In my dreams, I sometimes pair you with those
queens who slowly descend the golden, flowered
stairways of legend; I give you names that are
married with beauty, splendour and gladness, and
that rustle in silken syllables along verses
built as a platform for the dance of words and
their stately pageantries.
But how quickly I tire of the game, seeing you
gentle and wise, and so little like those whose
attitudes men embellish.
Your brow, so shining and pure and white with
certitude, your gentle, childlike hands peaceful
upon your knees, your breasts rising and falling
with the rhythm of your pulse that beats like
your immense, ingenuous heart,
Oh! how everything, except that and your prayer,
oh! how everything is poor and empty, except the
light that gazes at me and welcomes me in your
naked eyes.
XV
I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, my
gentlest thoughts, those I tell you, those also
that remain undefined and too deep to tell.
I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, to your
whole soul, my soul, with its tears and its
smiles and its kiss.
See, the dawn whitens the ground that is the
colour of lees of wine; shadowy bonds seem to
slip and glide away with melancholy; the water
of the ponds grows bright and sifts its noise;
the grass glitters and the flowers open, and the
golden woods free themselves from the night.
Oh! what if we could one day enter thus into the
full light; oh, what if we could one day, with
conquering cries and lofty prayers, with no more
veils upon us and no more remorse in us, oh! what
if we could one day enter together into lucid
love.
XVI
I drown my entire soul in your two eyes, and
the mad rapture of that frenzied soul, so that,
having been steeped in their gentleness and
prayer, it may be returned to me brighter and of
truer temper.
O for a union that refines the being, as two
golden windows in the same apse cross their
differently lucent fires and interpenetrate!
I am sometimes so heavy, so weary of being one
who cannot be perfect, as he would! My heart
struggles with its desires, my heart whose evil
weeds, between the rocks of stubbornness, rear
slyly their inky or burning flowers;
My heart, so false, so true, as the day may be,
my contradictory heart, my heart ever exaggerated
with immense joy or with criminal fear.
XVII
To love with our eyes, let us lave our gaze of
the gaze of those whose glances we have crossed,
by thousands, in life that is evil and enthralled.
The dawn is of flowers and dew and the mildest
sifted light; soft plumes of silver and sun seem
through the mists to brush and caress the mosses
in the garden.
Our blue and marvellous ponds quiver and come to
life with shimmering gold; emerald wings pass
under the trees; and the brightness sweeps from
the roads, the garths and the hedges the damp
ashen fog in which the twilight still lingers.
XVIII
In the garden of our love, summer still goes
on: yonder, a golden peacock crosses an avenue;
petals--pearls, emeralds, turquoises --deck the
uniform slumber of the green swards.
Our blue ponds shimmer, covered with the
white kiss of the snowy water-lilies; in the
quincunxes, our currant bushes follow one another
in procession; an iridescent insect teases the
heart of a flower; the marvellous undergrowths
are veined with gleams; and, like light bubbles,
a thousand bees quiver along the arbours over the
silver grapes.
The air is so lovely that it seems rainbow-hued;
beneath the deep and radiant noons, it stirs
as if it were roses of light; while, in the
distance, the customary roads, like slow
movements stretching their vermilion to the
pearly horizon, climb towards the sun.
Indeed, the diamonded gown of this fine
summer clothes no other garden with so pure a
brightness. And the unique joy sprung up in
our two hearts discovers its own life in these
clusters of flames.
XIX
May your bright eyes, your eyes of summer, be for
me here on earth the images of goodness.
Let our enkindled souls clothe with gold each
flame of our thoughts.
May my two hands against your heart be for you
here on earth the emblems of gentleness.
Let us live like two frenzied prayers straining
at all hours one towards the other.
May our kisses on our enraptured mouths be for us
here on earth the symbols of our life.
XX
Tell me, my simple and tranquil sweetheart, tell
me how much an absence, even of a day, saddens
and stirs up love, and reawakens it in all its
sleeping scalds?
I go to meet those who are returning from the
wondrous distances to which at dawn you went; I
sit beneath a tree at a bend of the path, and, on
the road, watching their coming, I gaze and gaze
earnestly at their eyes still bright with having
seen you.
And I would kiss their fingers that have touched
you, and cry out to them words they would not
understand; and I listen a long while to the
rhythm of their steps towards the shadow where
the old evenings hold night prone.
XXI
During those hours wherein we are lost so far
from all that is not ourselves, what lustral
blood or what baptism bathes our hearts that
strain towards all love?
Clasping our hands without praying, stretching
out our arms without crying aloud, but with
earnest and ingenuous mind worshipping something
farther off and purer than ourselves, we know not
what, how we blend with, how we live our lives
in, the unknown.
How overwhelmed we are in the presence of those
hours of supreme existence; how the soul desires
heavens in which to seek for new gods.
Oh! the torturing and wondrous joy and the daring
hope of being one day, across death itself, the
prey of these silent terrors.
XXII
Oh! this happiness, sometimes so rare and frail
that it frightens us!
In vain we hush our voices, and make of all your
hair a tent to shelter us; often the anguish in
our hearts flows over.
But our love, being like a kneeling angel, begs
and supplicates that the future give to others
than ourselves a like affection and life, so that
their fate may not be envious of ours.
And, too, on evil days, when the great evenings
extend to heaven the bounds of despair, we ask
forgiveness of the night that kindles with the
gentleness of our heart.
XXIII
Let us, in our love and ardour, let us live so
boldly our finest thoughts that they interweave
in harmony with the supreme ecstasy and perfect
fervour.
Because in our kindred souls something more holy
than we and purer and greater awakens, let us
clasp hands to worship it through ourselves.
It matters not that we have only cries or tears
to define it humbly, and that its charm is so
rare and powerful that, in the enjoyment of it,
our hearts are nigh to failing us.
Even so, let us remain, and for ever, the mad
devotees of this almost implacable love, and the
kneeling worshippers of the sudden God who reigns
in us, so violent and so ardently gentle that he
hurts and overwhelms us.
XXIV
So soon as our lips touch, we feel so much more
luminous together that it would seem as though
two Gods loved and united in us.
We feel our hearts to be so divinely fresh and
so renewed by their virgin light that, in their
brightness, the universe is made manifest to us.
In our eyes, joy is the only ferment of the world
that ripens and becomes fruitful innumerably on
our roads here below; as in clusters spring up
among the silken lakes on which sails travel the
myriad blossoms of the stars above.
Order dazzles us as fire embers, everything
bathes us in its light and appears a torch to us:
our simple words have a sense so lovely that we
repeat them to hear them without end.
We are the sublime conquerors who vanquish
eternity without pride and without a thought of
trifling time: and our love seems to us always to
have been.
XXV
To prevent the escape of any part of us from our
embrace that is so intense as to be holy, and to
let love shine clear through the body itself, we
go down together to the garden of the flesh.
Your breasts are there like offerings and your
two hands are stretched out to me; and nothing is
of so much worth as the simple provender of words
said and heard.
The shadow of the white boughs travels over your
neck and face, and your hair unloosens its bloom
in garlands on the swards.
The night is all of blue silver; the night is a
lovely silent bed--gentle night whose breezes,
one by one, will strip the great lilies erect in
the moonlight.
XXVI
Although autumn this evening along the paths and
the woods' edges lets the leaves fall slowly like
gilded hands;
Although autumn this evening with its arms of
wind harvests the petals and their pallor of the
earnest rose-trees;
We shall let nothing of our two souls fall
suddenly with these flowers.
But before the flames of the golden hearth of
memory, we will both crouch and warm our hands
and knees.
To guard against the sorrows hidden in the
future, against time that makes an end of all
ardour, against our terror and even against
ourselves, we will both crouch near the hearth
that our memory has lit up in us.
And if autumn involves the woods, the lawns and
the ponds in great banks of shadow and soaring
storms, at least its pain shall not disturb the
inner quiet garden where the equal footsteps of
our thoughts walk together in the light.
XXVII
The gift of the body when the soul is given is
but the accomplishment of two affections drawn
headlong one towards the other.
You are only happy in your body that is so lovely
in its native freshness because in all fervour
you may offer it to me wholly as a total alms.
And I give myself to you knowing nothing except
that I am greater by knowing you, who are ever
better and perhaps purer since your gentle body
offered its festival to mine.
Love, oh! let it be for us the sole discernment
and the sole reason of our heart, for us whose
most frenzied happiness is to be frenzied in our
trust.
XXVIII
Was there in us one fondness, one thought, one
gladness, one promise that we had not sown before
our footsteps?
Was there a prayer heard in secret whose hands
stretched out gently over our bosom we had not
clasped?
Was there one appeal, one purpose, one tranquil
or violent desire whose pace we had not quickened?
And each loving the other thus, our hearts went
out as apostles to the gentle, timid and chilled
hearts of others;
And by the power of thought invited them to
feel akin to ours, and, with frank ardours, to
proclaim love, as a host of flowers loves the
same branch that suspends and bathes it in the
sun.
And our soul, as though made greater in this
awakening, began to celebrate all that loves,
magnifying love for love's sake, and to cherish
divinely, with a wild desire, the whole world
that is summed up in us.
XXIX
The lovely garden blossoming with flames that
seemed to us the double or the mirror of the
bright garden we carried in our hearts is
crystallized in frost and gold this evening.
A great white silence has descended and sits
yonder on the marble horizons, towards which
march the trees in files, with their blue,
immense and regular shadow beside them.
No puff of wind, no breath. Alone, the great
veils of cold spread from plain to plain over the
silver marshes or crossing roads.
The stars appear to live. The hoar-frost shines
like steel through the translucent, frozen air.
Bright powdered metals seem to snow down, in the
infinite distances, from the pallor of a copper
moon. Everything sparkles in the stillness.
And it is the divine hour when the mind is
haunted by the thousand glances that are cast
upon earth by kind and pure and unchangeable
eternity towards the hazards of human
wretchedness.
XXX
If it should ever happen that, without our
knowledge, we became a pain or torment or despair
one to the other;
If it should come about that weariness or
hackneyed pleasure unbent in us the golden bow of
lofty desire;
If the crystal of pure thought must fall in our
hearts and break;
If, in spite of all, I should feel myself
vanquished because I had not bowed my will
sufficiently to the divine immensity of goodness;
Then, oh! then let us embrace like two sublime
madmen who beneath the broken skies cling to the
summits even so--and with one flight and soul
ablaze grow greater in death.
THE HOURS OF AFTERNOON
I
Step by step, day by day, age has come and placed
his hands upon the bare forehead of our love, and
has looked upon it with his dimmer eyes.
And in the fair garden shrivelled by July, the
flowers, the groves and the living leaves have
let fall something of their fervid strength on
to the pale pond and the gentle paths. Here and
there, the sun, harsh and envious, marks a hard
shadow around his light.
And yet the hollyhocks still persist in their
growth towards their final splendour, and the
seasons weigh upon our life in vain; more than
ever, all the roots of our two hearts plunge
unsatiated into happiness, and clutch, and sink
deeper.
Oh! these hours of afternoon girt with roses that
twine around time, and rest against his benumbed
flanks with cheeks aflower and aflame!
And nothing, nothing is better than to feel thus,
still happy and serene, after how many years?
But if our destiny had been quite different, and
we had both been called upon to suffer--even
then!--oh! I should have been happy to live and
die, without complaining, in my stubborn love.
II
Roses of June, you the fairest with your hearts
transfixed by the sun; violent and tranquil
roses, like a delicate flock of birds settled on
the branches;
Roses of June and July, upright and new, mouths
and kisses that suddenly move or grow still with
the coming and going of the wind, caress of
shadow and gold on the restless garden;
Roses of mute ardour and gentle will, roses of
voluptuousness in your mossy sheaths, you who
spend the days of high summer loving each other
in the brightness;
Fresh, glowing, magnificent roses, all our roses,
oh! that, like you, our manifold desires, in our
dear weariness or trembling pleasure, might love
and exalt each other and rest!
III
If other flowers adorn the house and the
splendour of the countryside, the pure ponds
shine still in the grass with the great eyes of
water of their mobile face.
Who can say from what far-off and unknown
distances so many new birds have come with sun on
their wings?
In the garden, April has given way to July, and
the blue tints to the great carnation tints;
space is warm and the wind frail; a thousand
insects glisten joyously in the air; and summer
passes in her robe of diamonds and sparks.
IV
The darkness is lustral and the dawn iridescent.
From the lofty branch whence a bird flies, the
dew-drops fall.
A lucid and frail purity adorns a morning so
bright that prisms seem to gleam in the air. A
spring babbles; a noise of wings is heard.
Oh! how beautiful are your eyes at that first
hour when our silver ponds shimmer in the light
and reflect the day that is rising. Your forehead
is radiant and your blood beats.
Intense and wholesome life in all its divine
strength enters your bosom so completely, like a
driving happiness, that to contain its anguish
and its fury, your hands suddenly take mine, and
press them almost fearfully against your heart.
V
I bring you this evening, as an offering, my joy
at having plunged my body into the silk and gold
of the frank and joyous wind and the gorgeous
sun; my feet are bright with having walked among
the grasses; my hands sweet with having touched
the heart of flowers; my eyes shining at having
felt the tears suddenly well up and spring into
them before the earth in festival and its eternal
strength.
Space has carried me away drunken and fervent
and sobbing in its arms of moving brightness;
and I have passed I know not where, far away in
the distance, with pent-up cries set free by my
footsteps.
I bring you life and the beauty of the plains
breathe them on me in a good, frank breath; the
marjoram has caressed my fingers, and the air and
its light and its perfumes are in my flesh.
VI
Let us both sit down on the old worm-eaten bench
near the path; and let my hand remain a long
while within your two steadfast hands.
With my hand that remains a long while given
up to the sweet consciousness of being on your
knees, my heart also, my earnest, gentle heart,
seems to rest between your two kind hands.
And we share an intense joy and a deep love to
feel that we are so happy together, without one
over-strong word to come trembling to our lips,
or one kiss even to go burning towards your brow.
And we would prolong the ardour of this silence
and the stillness of our mute desires, were it
not that suddenly, feeling them quiver, I clasp
tightly, without willing it, your thinking hands;
Your hands in which my whole happiness is hidden,
and which would never, for anything in the world,
deal violently with those deep things we live by,
although in duty we do not speak of them.
VII
Gently, more gently still, cradle my head in your
arms, my fevered brow and my weary eyes;
Gently, more gently still, kiss my lips, and
say to me those words that are sweeter at each
dawn when your voice repeats them, and you have
surrendered, and I love you still.
The day rises sullen and heavy; the night was
crossed by monstrous dreams; the rain and its
long hair whip our casement, and the horizon is
black with clouds of grief.
Gently, more gently still, cradle my head in your
arms, my fevered brow and my weary eyes; you are
my hopeful dawn, with its caress in your hands
and its light in your sweet words;
See, I am re-born, without pain or shock, to the
daily labour that traces its mark on my road,
and instils into my life the will to be a weapon
of strength and beauty in the golden grasp of an
honoured life.
VIII
In the house chosen by our love as its
birth-place, with its cherished furniture
peopling the shadows and the nooks, where we live
together, having as sole witnesses the roses that
watch us through the windows,
Certain days stand out of so great a consolation,
certain hours of summer so lovely in their
silence, that sometimes I stop time that swings
with its golden disc in the oaken clock.
Then the hour, the day, the night is so much ours
that the happiness that hovers lightly over us
hears nothing but the throbbing of your heart and
mine that are brought close together by a sudden
embrace.
IX
The pleasant task with the window open and the
shadow of the green leaves and the passage of
the sun on the ruddy paper, maintains the gentle
violence of its silence in our good and pensive
house.
And the flowers bend nimbly and the large fruits
shine from branch to branch, and the blackbirds,
the bullfinches and the chaffinches sing and
sing, so that my verses may burst forth clear and
fresh, pure and true, like their songs, their
golden flesh and their scarlet petals.
And I see you pass in the garden, sometimes
mingled with the sun and shadow; but your head
does not turn, so that the hour in which I work
jealousy at these frank and gentle poems may not
be disturbed.
X
In the depth of our love dwells all faith; we
bind up a glowing thought together with the least
things: the awakening of a bud, the decline of a
rose, the flight of a frail and beautiful bird
that, by turns, appears or disappears in the
shadow or the light.
A nest falling to pieces on the mossy edge of
a roof and ravaged by the wind fills the mind
with dread. An insect eating the heart of the
hollyhocks terrifies: all is fear, all is hope.
Though reason with its sharp and soothing snow
may suddenly cool these charming pangs, what
matters! Let us accept them without inquiring
overmuch into the false, the true, the evil or
the good they portend;
Let us be happy that we can be as children,
believing in their fatal or triumphant power, and
let us guard with closed shutters against too
sensible people.
XI
Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars;
that which the night conceals or shows between
its veils is mingled with the fervour of our
exalted being. Those who live with love live with
eternity.
It matters not that their reason approve or
scoff, and, upright on its high walls, hold out
to them, along the quays and harbours, its bright
torches; they are the travellers from beyond the
sea.
Far off, farther than the ocean and its black
floods, they watch the day break from shore to
shore; fixed certainty and trembling hope present
the same front to their ardent gaze.
Happy and serene, they believe eagerly; their
soul is the deep and sudden brightness with which
they burn the summit of the loftiest problems;
and to know the world, they but scrutinize
themselves.
They follow distant roads chosen by themselves,
living with the truths enclosed within their
simple, naked eyes, that are deep and gentle as
the dawn; and for them alone there is still song
in paradise.
XII
This is the holy hour when the lamp is lit:
everything is calm and comforting this evening;
and the silence is such that you could hear the
falling of feathers.
This is the holy hour when gently the beloved
comes, like the breeze or smoke, most gently,
most slowly. At first, she says nothing--and I
listen; and I catch a glimpse of her soul, that
I hear wholly, shining and bursting forth; and I
kiss her on the eyes.
This is the holy hour when the lamp is lit, when
the acknowledgment of mutual love the whole day
long is brought forth from the depths of our deep
but transparent heart.
And we each tell the other of the simplest
things: the fruit gathered in the garden, the
flower that has opened between the green mosses;
and the thought that has sprung from some
sudden emotion at the memory of a faded word of
affection found at the bottom of an old drawer on
a letter of yesteryear.
XIII
The dead kisses of departed years have put their
seal on your face, and, beneath the melancholy
and furrowing wind of age, many of the roses in
your features have faded.
I see your mouth and your great eyes glow no more
like a morning of festival, nor your head slowly
recline in the black and massive garden of your
hair.
Your dear hands, that remain so gentle, approach
no more as in former years with light at their
finger-tips to caress my forehead, as dawn the
mosses.
Your young and lovely body that I adorned with
my thoughts has no longer the pure freshness of
dew, and your arms are no longer like the bright
branches.
Alas! everything falls and fades ceaselessly;
everything has changed, even your voice; your
body has collapsed like a pavise, and let fall
the victories of youth.
But nevertheless my steadfast and earnest heart
says to you: what are to me the years made
heavier day by day, since I know that nothing in
the world will disturb our exalted life, and that
our soul is too profound for love still to depend
on beauty?
XIV
For fifteen years our thoughts have run together,
and our fine and serene ardour has vanquished
habit, the dull-voiced shrew whose slow, rough
hands wear out the most stubborn and the
strongest love.
I look at you and I discover you each day, so
intimate is your gentleness or your pride: time
indeed obscures the eyes of your beauty, but it
exalts your heart, whose golden depths peep open.
Artlessly, you allow yourself to be probed and
known, and your soul always appears fresh and
new; with gleaming masts, like an eager caravel,
our happiness covers the seas of our desires.
It is in us alone that we anchor our faith, to
naked sincerity and simple goodness; we move
and live in the brightness of a joyous and
translucent trust.
Your strength is to be infinitely pure and frail;
to cross with burning heart all dark roads, and
to have preserved, in spite of mist or darkness,
all the rays of the dawn in your childlike soul.
XV
I thought our joy benumbed for ever, like a
sun faded before it was night, on the day that
illness with its leaden arms dragged me heavily
towards its chair of weariness.
The flowers and the garden were fear or deception
to me; my eyes suffered to see the white noons
flaming, and my two hands, my hands, seemed,
before their time, too tired to hold captive our
trembling happiness.
My desires had become no more than evil weeds;
they bit at each other like thistles in the wind;
I felt my heart to be at once ice and burning
coal and of a sudden dried up and stubborn in
forgiveness.
But you said the word that gently comforts,
seeking it nowhere else than in your immense
love; and I lived with the fire of your word, and
at night warmed myself at it until the dawn of
day.
The diminished man I felt myself to be, both to
myself and all others, did not exist for you; you
gathered flowers for me from the window-sill,
and, with your faith, I believed in health.
And you brought to me, in the folds of your gown,
the keen air, the wind of the fields and forests,
and the perfumes of evening or the scents of
dawn, and, in your fresh and deep-felt kisses,
the sun.
XVI
Everything that lives about us in the fragile and
gentle light, frail grasses, tender branches,
hollyhocks, and the shadow that brushes them
lightly by, and the wind that knots them, and the
singing and hopping birds that swarm riotously
in the sun like clusters of jewels,-- everything
that lives in the fine ruddy garden loves us
artlessly, and we--we love everything.
We worship the lilies we see growing; and the
tall sunflowers, brighter than the Nadir--
circles surrounded by petals of flames--burn our
souls through their glow.
The simplest flowers, the phlox and the lilac,
grow along the walls among the feverfew, to be
nearer to our footsteps; and the involuntary
weeds in the turf over which we have passed open
their eyes wet with dew.
And we live thus with the flowers and the grass,
simple and pure, glowing and exalted, lost in our
love, like the sheaves in the gold of the corn,
and proudly allowing the imperious summer to
pierce our bodies, our hearts and our two wills
with its full brightness.
XVII
Because you came one day so simply along the
paths of devotion and took my life into your
beneficent hands, I love and praise and thank you
with my senses, with my heart and brain, with my
whole being stretched like a torch towards your
unquenchable goodness and charity.
Since that day, I know what love, pure and bright
as the dew, falls from you on to my calmed soul.
I feel myself yours by all the burning ties that
attach flames to their fire; all my body, all my
soul mounts towards you with tireless ardour; I
never cease to brood on your deep earnestness and
your charm, so much so that suddenly I feel my
eyes fill deliciously with unforgettable tears.
And I make towards you, happy and calm, with the
proud desire to be for ever the most steadfast of
joys to you. All our affection flames about us;
every echo of my being responds to your call; the
hour is unique and sanctified with ecstasy, and
my fingers are tremulous at the mere touching of
your forehead, as though they brushed the wing of
your thoughts.
XVIII
On days of fresh and tranquil health, when life
is as fine as a conquest, the pleasant task sits
down by my side like an honoured friend.
He comes from gentle, radiant countries, with
words brighter than the dews, in which to set,
illuminating them, our feelings and our thoughts.
He seizes our being in a mad whirlwind; he lifts
up the mind on giant pilasters; he pours into it
the fire that makes the stars live; he brings the
gift of being God suddenly.
And fevered transports and deep terrors-- all
serves his tragic will to make young again the
blood of beauty in the veins of the world.
I am at his mercy like a glowing prey.
Therefore, when I return, though wearied and
heavy, to the repose of your love, with the fires
of my vast and supreme idea, it seems to me--oh!
but for a moment--that I am bringing to you in
my panting heart the heart-beat of the universe
itself.
XIX
Out of the groves of sleep I came, somewhat
morose because I had left you beneath their
branches and their braided shadows, far from the
glad morning sun.
Already the phlox and the hollyhocks glisten, and
I wander in the garden dreaming of verses clear
as crystal and silver that would ring in the
light.
Then abruptly I return to you with so great a
fervour and emotion that it seems to me as though
my thought suddenly has already crossed from afar
the leafy and heavy darkness of sleep to call
forth your joy and your awakening.
And when I join you once more in our warm house
that is still possessed by darkness and silence,
my clear, frank kisses ring like a dawn-song in
the valleys of your flesh.
XX
Alas! when the lead of illness flowed in my
benumbed veins with my heavy, sluggish blood,
with my blood day by day heavier and more
sluggish;
When my eyes, my poor eyes, followed peevishly on
my long, pale hands the fatal marks of insidious
malady;
When my skin dried up like bark, and I had no
longer even strength enough to press my fiery
lips against your heart, and there kiss our
happiness;
When sad and identical days morosely gnawed my
life, I might never have found the will and the
strength to hold out stoically,
Had you not, each hour of the so long weeks,
poured into my daily body with your patient,
gentle, placid hands the secret heroism that
flowed in yours.
XXI
Our bright garden is health itself.
It is squandered in its brightness from the
thousand hands of the branches and leaves as they
wave to and fro.
And the pleasant shade that welcomes our feet
after the long roads pours into our tired limbs
a quickening strength, gentle as the garden's
mosses.
When the pond plays with the wind and the sun, a
ruddy heart seems to dwell in the depths of the
water, and to beat, ardent and young, with the
ripples; and the tall, straight gladioli and the
glowing roses that move in their splendour hold
out their golden goblets of red blood at the end
of their living stalks.
Our bright garden is health itself.
XXII
It was June in the garden, our hour and our day,
and our eyes looked upon all things with so
great a love that the roses seemed to us to open
gently, and to see and love us.
The sky was purer than it had ever been: the
insects and birds floated in the gold and
gladness of an air as frail as silk, and our
kisses were so exquisite that they gave an added
beauty to the sunshine and the birds.
It was as though our happiness had suddenly
become azure, and required the whole sky wherein
to shine; through gentle openings, all life
entered our being, to expand it.
And we were nothing but invocatory cries, and
wild raptures, and vows and entreaties, and the
need, suddenly, to recreate the gods, in order to
believe.
XXIII
The gift of yourself no longer satisfies you; you
are prodigal of yourself: the rapture that bears
you on to ever greater love springs up in you
ceaselessly and untiringly, and carries you ever
higher towards the wide heaven of perfect love.
A clasp of the hands, a gentle look impassions
you; and your heart appears to me so suddenly
lovely that I am afraid sometimes of your eyes
and your lips, and that I am unworthy and that
you love me too much.
Ah! these bright ardours of an affection too
lofty for a poor human being who has only a poor
heart, all moist with regrets, all thorny with
faults, to feel their passing and dissolve in
tears.
XXIV
Oh! the calm summer garden where nothing moves!
Unless it be, near the middle of the bright and
radiant pond, the goldfish like tongues of fire.
They are our memories playing in our thoughts
that are calm and stilled and limpid, like the
trustful and restful water.
And the water brightens and the fishes leap at
the abrupt and marvellous sun, not far from the
green irises and the white shells and stones,
motionless about the ruddy edges.
And it is sweet to watch them thus come and go
in the freshness and splendour that touches them
lightly, careless and without fear that they
will bring from the depths to the surface other
regrets than fleeting.
XXV
As with others, an hour has its ill-humour: the
peevish hour or a malevolent humour has sometimes
stamped our hearts with its black seals; and yet,
in spite of all, even at the close of the darkest
days, never have our hearts said the irrevocable
words.
A radiant and glowing sincerity was our joy and
counsel, and our passionate soul found therein
ever new strength, as in a ruddy flood.
And we recounted each to the other our
wretchedest woes, telling them like some harsh
rosary, as we stood facing one another, with our
love rising in sobs; and our two mouths, at each
avowal, gently and in turn kissed our faults on
the lips that uttered them aloud.
Thus, very simply, without baseness or bitter
words, we escaped from the world and from
ourselves, sparing ourselves all grief and
gnawing cares, and watching the rebirth of our
soul, as the purity of glass and gold of a
window-pane is reborn after the rain, when the
sun warms it and gently dries it.
XXVI
The golden barks of lovely summer that set out,
riotous for space, are returning sad and weary
from the blood-stained horizons.
With monotonous strokes of the oars, they advance
upon the waters; they are as cradles in which
sleep autumn flowers.
Stalks of lilies with golden brows, you all lie
overthrown; alone, the roses struggle to live
beyond death.
What matters to their full beauty that October
shine or April: their simple and puerile desire
drinks all light until the blood comes.
Even on the blackest days, when the sky dies,
they strive towards Christmas, beneath a harsh
and haggard cloud, the moment the first ray darts
through.
You, our souls, do as they; they have not the
pride of the lilies; but within their folds they
guard a holy and immortal ardour.
XXVII
Ardour of senses, ardour of hearts, ardour of
souls, vain words created by those who diminish
love; sun, you do not distinguish among your
flames those of evening, of dawn, or of noon!
You walk blinded by your own light in the torrid
azure under the great arched skies, knowing
nothing, unless it be that your strength is
all-powerful and that your fire labours at the
divine mysteries.
For love is an act of ceaseless exaltation. O you
whose gentleness bathes my proud heart, what need
to weigh the pure gold of our dream? I love you
altogether, with my whole being.
XXVIII
The still beauty of summer evenings on the
greenswards where they lie outspread holds out to
us, without empty gesture or words, a symbol of
rest in gladness.
Young morning and its tricks has gone away with
the breezes; noon itself and the velvet skirts
of its warm winds, of its heavy winds, no longer
sweeps the torrid plain; and this is the hour
when, without a branch's moving or a pond's
ruffling its waters, the evening slowly comes
from the tops of the mountains and takes its seat
in the garden.
O the infinite golden flatness of the waters, and
the trees and their shadows on the reeds, and
the calm and sumptuous silence in whose still
presence we so greatly delight that we desire to
live with it always or to die of it and revive
by it, like two imperishable hearts tirelessly
drunken with brightness.
XXIX
You said to me, one evening, words so beautiful
that doubtless the flowers that leaned towards us
suddenly loved us, and one among them, in order
to touch us both, fell upon our knees.
You spoke to me of a time nigh at hand when our
years like over-ripe fruit would be ready for the
gathering, how the knell of destiny would ring
out, and how we should love each other, feeling
ourselves growing old.
Your voice enfolded me like a dear embrace, and
your heart burned so quietly beautiful, that at
that moment I could have seen without fear the
beginning of the tortuous roads that lead to the
tomb.
XXX
"Hours of bright morning," "Hours of afternoon,"
hours that stand out superbly and gently, whose
dance lengthens along our warm garden-paths,
saluted at passing by our golden rose-trees;
summer is dying and autumn coming in.
Hours girt with blossom, will you ever return?
Yet, if destiny, that wields the stars, spares us
its pains, its blows and its disasters, perhaps
one day you will return, and, before my eyes,
interweave in measure your radiant steps;
And I will mingle with your glowing, gentle
dance, winding in shade and sun over the lawns
--like a last, immense and supreme hope--the
steps and farewells of my "hours of evening."
THE HOURS OF EVENING
I
Dainty flowers, like a froth of foam, grew along
the borders of our paths; the wind fell and the
air seemed to brush your hands and hair with
plumes.
The shade was kindly to us as we walked in step
beneath the leafage; a child's song reached us
from a village, and filled all the infinite.
Our ponds were outspread in their autumn
splendour under the guard of the long reeds, and
the lofty, swaying crown on the woods' fine brow
was mirrored in the waters.
And both knowing that our hearts were brooding
together on the same thought, we reflected that
it was our calmed life that was revealed to us in
this lovely evening.
For one supreme moment, you saw the festival sky
deck itself out and say farewell to us; and for a
long, long while you gave it your eyes filled to
the brim with mute caresses.
II
If it were true that a garden flower or a meadow
tree could keep some memory of lovers of other
times who admired them in their bloom or their
vigour, our love in this hour of long regret
would come and entrust to the rose or erect
in the oak, before the approach of death, its
sweetness or its strength.
Thus it would survive, victor over funereal care,
in the tranquil godship conferred on it by simple
things; it would still enjoy the pure brightness
cast on life by a summer dawn and the soft rain
hanging to the leaves.
And if on a fine evening, out of the depths of
the plain, a couple came along, holding hands,
the oak would stretch out its broad and powerful
shade like a wing over their path, and the rose
would waft them its frail perfume.
III
The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead; but
this is the season of the heather in flower, and
on this calm and gentle evening the caressing
wind brings you the perfumes of poor Campine.
Love them and breathe them in while brooding over
its fate; its soil is bare and harsh and the wind
wars on it; pools make their holes in it; the
sand preys on it, and the little left to it, it
yet gives.
Once in autumn, we lived with it, with its plain
and its woods, with its rain and its sky, even to
December when the Christmas angels crossed its
legend with mighty strokes of their wings.
Your heart became more steadfast there, simpler
and more human; we loved the people of its old
villages, and the women who spoke to us of their
great age and of spinning-wheels fallen from use,
worn out by their hands.
Our calm house on the misty heath was bright to
look upon and ready in its welcome; and dear to
us were its roof and its door and its threshold
and its hearth blackened by the smoky peat.
When night spread out its total splendour over
the vast and pale and innumerable somnolence, the
silence taught us lessons, the glow of which our
soul has never forgotten.
Because we felt more lonely in the vast plain,
the dawns and the evenings sank more deeply
into us; our eyes were franker, our hearts were
gentler and filled to the brim with the fervour
of the world.
We found happiness by not asking for it; even the
sadness of the days was good for us, and the few
sun-rays of that end of autumn gladdened us all
the more because they seemed weak and tired.
The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead; but
this is the season of the heather in flower. This
evening, remember, and let the caressing wind
bring you the perfumes of poor Campine.
IV
Draw up your chair near mine, and stretch your
hands out towards the hearth that I may see
between your fingers the old flame burning; and
watch the fire quietly with your eyes that fear
no light, that they may be for me still franker
when a quick and flashing ray strikes to their
depths, illuminating them.
Oh! how beautiful and young still our life is
when the clock rings out with its golden tone,
and, coming closer, I brush you lightly and touch
you, and a slow and gentle fever that neither
desires to allay leads the sure and wondrous
kiss from the hands to the forehead and from the
forehead to the lips.
How I love you then, my bright beloved, in your
welcoming, gently swooning body, that encircles
me in its turn and dissolves me in its gladness!
Everything becomes dearer to me--your mouth, your
arms, your kindly breasts where my poor, tired
forehead will lie quietly near your heart after
the moment of riotous pleasure that you grant me.
For I love you still better after the sensual
hour, when your goodness, still more steadfast
and maternal, makes for me a soft repose,
following sharp ardour, and when, after desire
has cried out its violence, I hear approaching
our regular happiness with steps so gentle that
they are but silence.
V
Be once more merciful and cheering to us, light,
pale brightness of winter that will bathe our
brows when of an afternoon we both go into the
garden to breathe in one last warmth.
We loved you long ago with so great a pride, with
so great a love springing from our hearts, that
one supreme and gentle and kindly flame is due to
us at this hour when grief awaits us.
You are that which no man ever forgets, from the
day when you first struck his victorious arms,
and when, on the coming of evening, you slept in
his eyes with your dead splendour and vanquished
strength.
And for us you were always the visible fervour
that, being everywhere diffused and shining in
fevers of deep and stinging ardour, seemed to
start for the infinite from our heart.
VI
Alas! the days of the crimson phlox and of the
proud roses that brightened its gates are far
away, but however faded and withered it may
be--what matters!--I love our garden still with
all my heart.
Its distress is sometimes dearer and sweeter to
me than was its gladness in the burning summer
days. Oh! the last perfume slowly rendered up by
its last flower on its last mosses!
I wandered this evening among its winding
pathways, to touch with my earnest fingers all
its plants; and falling on my knees amid the
trembling grasses, I gave a long kiss to its damp
and heavy soil.
And now let it die, and the mist and night come
and spread over all; all my being seems to
have entered into our garden's ruin, and, by
understanding its death, I shall learn to know my
own.
VII
The evening falls, the moon is golden.
Before the day ends, go gaily into the garden and
pluck with your gentle hands the few flowers that
have not yet bowed sadly towards the earth.
Though their leaves may be wan, what matters! I
admire them and you love them, and their petals
are beautiful, in spite of all, on the stalks
that bear them.
And you went away into the distance among the
box-trees, along a monotonous path, and the
nosegay that you plucked trembled in your hand
and suddenly quivered; and then your dreaming
fingers devoutly gathered together these
glimmering autumn roses and wove them with tears
into a pale and bright and supple crown.
The last light lit up your eyes, and your long
step became sad and silent.
And slowly in the twilight you returned with
empty hands to the house, leaving not far from
our door, on a damp, low hillock, the white
circle that your fingers had formed.
And I understood then that in the weary garden
wherethrough the winds will soon pass like
squadrons, you desired for the last time to adorn
with flowers our youth that lies there dead.
VIII
When your hand, on an evening of the sluggish
months, commits to the odorous cupboards the
fruits of your orchard, I seem to see you calmly
arranging our old perfumed and sweet-tasting
memories.
And my relish for them returns, as it was in
former years in the gold and the sun and with
the wind on my lips; and then I see a thousand
moments done and gone, and their gladness and
their laughter and their cries and their fevers.
The past reawakens with so great a desire to be
the present still, with its life and strength,
that the hardly extinguished fires suddenly burn
my body, and my heart rejoices to the point of
swooning.
O beautiful luminous fruits in these autumn
shadows, jewels fallen from the heavy necklace
of russet summer, splendours that light up our
monotonous hours, what a ruddy and spacious
awakening you stir up in us!
IX
And now that the lofty leaves have fallen, that
kept our garden sheltered beneath their shade,
through the bare branches can be seen beyond them
the roofs of the old villages climbing towards
the horizon.
So long as summer poured out its gladness, none
of us saw them grouped so near our door; but now
that the flowers and the leaves are withered, we
often brood on them with gentle thoughts.
Other people live there between stone walls,
behind a worn threshold protected by a coping,
having as sole friends but the wind and the rain
and the lamp shining with its friendly light.
In the darkness at the fall of evening, when the
fire awakens and the clock in which time swings
is hushed, doubtless, as much as we, they love
the silence, to feel themselves thinking through
their eyes.
Nothing disturbs for them or for us those hours
of deep and quiet and tender intimacy wherein the
moment that was is blessed for having been, and
of which the coming hour is always the best.
Indeed, how they also clench the old happiness,
made up of pain and joy, within their trembling
hands; they know each other's bodies that have
grown old together, and each other's looks worn
out by the same sorrows.
The roses of their life, they love them faded,
with their dead glory and their last perfume and
the heavy memory of their dead brightness falling
away, leaf by leaf, in the garden of the years.
Against black winter, like hermits, they stay
crouching within their human fervour, and nothing
disheartens them and nothing leads them to
complain of the days they no longer possess.
Oh! the quiet people in the depths of old
villages! Indeed, do we not feel them neighbours
of our heart! And do we not find in their eyes
our tears and in their courage our strength and
ardour!
They are there beneath their roof, seated
around fires, or lingering sometimes at their
window-sill; and on this evening of spacious,
floating wind, perhaps they have thought of us
what we think of them.
X
When the starry sky covers our dwelling, we hush
for hours before its intense and gentle fire,
so that we may feel a greater and more fervent
stirring within us.
The great silver stars follow their courses high
up in the heavens; beneath the flames and the
gleams, night spreads out its depths, and the
calm is so great that the ocean listens!
But what matters even the hushing of the sea, if
in the brightness and immensity of space, full of
invisible violence, our hearts beat so strongly
that they make all the silence?
XI
With the same love that you were for me long ago
a garden of splendour whose wavering coppices
shaded the long grass and the docile roses,
you are for me in these black days a calm and
steadfast sanctuary.
All is centred there: your fervour and your
brightness and your movements assembling the
flowers of your goodness; but all is drawn
together closely in a deep peace against the
sharp winds piercing the winter of the world.
My happiness keeps warm there within your folded
arms; your pretty, artless words, in their
gladness and familiarity, sing still with as
great a charm to my ears as in the days of the
white lilac or of the red currants.
Oh! I feel your gay and shining cheerfulness
triumphing day by day over the sorrow of the
years, and you yourself smile at the silver
threads that slip their waving network into your
glossy hair.
When your head bends to my deep-felt kiss, what
does it matter to me that your brow is furrowed,
and that your hands are becoming ridged with hard
veins when I hold them between my two steadfast
hands!
You never complain, and you believe firmly that
nothing true dies when love receives its meed,
and that the living fire on which our soul feeds
consumes even grief to increase its flame.
XII
The flowers of bright welcome along the wall
await us no longer when we go indoors, and our
silken ponds whose smooth waters chafe lie
outstretched no more beneath pure, soft skies.
All the birds have fled our monotonous plains,
and pallid fogs float over the marshes. O those
two cries: autumn, winter! winter, autumn! Do you
hear the dead wood falling in the forest?
No more is our garden the husband of light,
whence the phlox were seen springing towards
their glory; our fiery gladioli are mingled with
the earth, and have lain down in their length to
die.
Everything is nerveless and void of beauty;
everything is flameless and passes and flees and
bends and sinks down unsupported. Oh! give me
your eyes lit up by your soul that I may seek in
them in spite of all a corner of the old sky.
In them alone our light lives still, the light
that covered all the garden long ago, when it
exulted with the white pride of our lilies and
the climbing ardour of our hollyhocks.
XIII
When the fine snow with its sparkling grains
silts over our threshold, I hear your footsteps
wander and stop in the neighbouring room.
You withdraw the bright and fragile mirror from
its place by the window, and your bunch of
keys dances along the drawer of the beech-wood
wardrobe.
I listen, and you are poking the fire and
arousing the embers; and you are arranging about
the silent walls the silence of the chairs.
You remove the fleeting dust from the workbasket
with the narrow feet, and your ring strikes and
resounds on the quivering sides of a wine-glass.
And I am more happy than ever this evening at
your tender presence, and at feeling you near and
not seeing you and ever hearing you.
XIV
If fate has saved us from commonplace errors and
from vile untruth and from sorry shams, it is
because all constraint that might have bowed our
double fervour revolted us.
You went your way, free and frank and bright,
mingling with the flowers of love the flowers of
your will, and gently lifting up towards yourself
its lofty spirit when my brow was bent towards
fear or doubt.
And you were always kind and artless in your
acts, knowing that my heart was for ever yours;
for if I loved--do I now know?--some other woman,
it is to your heart that I always returned.
Your eyes were then so pure in their tears that
my being was stirred to sincerity and truth; and
I repeated to you holy and gentle words, and your
weapons were sadness and forgiveness.
And in the evening I lulled my head to sleep on
your bright bosom, happy at having returned from
false and dim distances to the fragrant spring
that bore sway in us, and I remained a captive in
your open arms.
XV
No, my heart has never tired of you.
In the time of June, long ago, you said to me:
"If I knew, friend, if I knew that my presence
one day might be a burden to you-- with my poor
heart and sorrowful thoughts, I would go away, no
matter where."
And gently your forehead rose towards my kiss.
And you said to me again: "Bonds loosen always
and life is so full, and what matters if the
chain is golden that ties to the same ring in
port our two human barks!"
And gently your tears revealed to me your grief.
And you said and you said again: "Let us
separate, let us separate before the evil days;
our life has been too lofty to drag it trivially
from fault to fault."
And you fled and you fled, and my two hands
desperately held you back.
No, my heart has never tired of you.
XVI
How happy we are still and proud of living when
the least ray of sunshine glimpsed in the heavens
lights up for a moment the poor flowers of rime
that the hard and delicate frost engraved on our
window-panes.
Rapture leaps in us and hope carries us away, and
our old garden appears to us again, in spite of
its long paths strewn with dead branches, living
and pure and bright and full of golden gleams.
Something shining and undaunted, I know not what,
creeps into our blood; and in the quick kisses
that, ardently, frantically, we give each other,
we re-embody the immensity and fulness of summer.
XVII
Shall we suffer, alas! the dead weight of the
years until at length we are no more than two
quiet people, exchanging the harmless kisses of
children at evening when the fire flames in the
hollow of the chimney?
Shall our dear furniture see us drag ourselves
with slow steps from the hearth to the beechen
chest, support ourselves by the wall to reach the
window, and huddle our tottering bodies on heavy
seats?
If our wreck is to appear one day in such guise,
while numbness deadens our brains and our arms,
we shall not bemoan, in spite of evil fate, and
we shall hold our tears pent up in our breasts.
For even so, we shall still keep our eyes with
which to gaze on the day that follows night, and
to see the dawn and the sun shed their radiance
on life, and make a wonderful object of the
earth.
XVIII
The small happenings, the thousand nothings, a
letter, a date, a humble anniversary, a word said
once again as in days long ago uplift your heart
and mine in these long evenings.
And we celebrate for ourselves these simple
things, and we count and recount our old
treasures, so that the little of us that we still
keep may remain steadfast and brave before the
sullen hour.
And more than is fitting, we show ourselves
solicitous of these poor, gentle, kindly joys
that sit down on the bench near the flaming fire
with winter flowers on their thin knees.
And they take from the chest where their goodness
hides it the bright bread of happiness that was
allotted to us, and of which Love in our house
has so long eaten that he loves it even to the
crumbs.
XIX
Come even to our threshold, scattering your
white ash, O peaceful, slowly falling snow: the
lime-tree in the garden holds all its branches
bowed, and the light calandra dissolves in the
sky no longer.
O snow, who warm and protect the barely rising
corn with the moss and wool that you spread from
plain to plain! Silent snow, the gentle friend of
the houses asleep in the calm of morning:
Cover our roof and lightly touch our windows, and
suddenly enter by the door over the threshold
with your pure flakes and your dancing flames,
O snow, luminous through our soul, snow, who also
warm our last dreams like the rising corn!
XX
When our bright garden was gay with all its
flowers, the regret at having shrunk our hearts
sprang from our lips in moments of passion; and
forgiveness, offered but deserved always, and
the exaggerated display of our wretchedness and
so many tears moistening our sad, sincere eyes
uplifted our love.
But in these months of heavy rain, when
everything huddles together and makes itself
small, when brightness itself tires of thrusting
back shadow and night, our soul is no longer
vibrant and strong enough to confess our faults
with rapture.
We tell them in slow speech; in truth, with
affection still, but at the fall of the evening
and no longer at dawn; sometimes even we count
them on our ten fingers like things that we
number and arrange in the house, and to lessen
their folly or their number we debate them.
XXI
With my old hands lifted to your forehead,
during your brief sleep by the black hearth this
evening, I part your hair, and I kiss the fervour
of your eyes hidden beneath your long lashes.
Oh! the sweet affection of this day's end! My
eyes follow the years that have completed their
course, and suddenly your life appears so perfect
in them that my love is moved by a touching
respect.
And as in the time when you were my betrothed,
the desire comes back to me again in all its
ardour to fall on my knees, and with fingers as
chaste as my thoughts to touch the place where
your gentle heart beats.
XXII
If our hearts have burned in uplifting days with
a love as bright as it was lofty, age now makes
us slack and indulgent and mild before our faults.
You no longer make us greater, O youthful will,
with your unsubdued ardour, and our life is
coloured now with gentle calm and pale kindliness.
We are at the setting of your sun, love, and we
mask our weakness with the common-place words and
poor speeches of an empty, tardy wisdom.
Oh! how sad and shameful would the future be for
us if from our winter and our mistiness there
did not break out like a torch the memory of the
high-spirited souls we once were.
XXIII
In this rugged winter when the floating sun
founders on the horizon like a heavy wreck, I
love to say your name, with its slow, solemn
tone, as the clock echoes with the deep strokes
of time.
And the more I say it, the more ravished is my
voice, so much so that from my lips it descends
into my heart and awakens in me a more glowing
happiness than the sweetest words I have spoken
in my life.
And before the new dawn or the evening falling
to sleep, I repeat it with my voice that is ever
the same, but oh! with what strength and supreme
ardour shall I pronounce it at the hour of death!
XXIV
Perhaps, when my last day comes, perhaps, if only
for a moment, a frail and quavering sun will
stoop down at my window.
My hands then, my poor faded hands, will even so
be gilded once again by his glory; he will touch
my mouth and my forehead a last time with his
slow, bright, deep kiss; and the pale, but still
proud flowers of my eyes will return his light
before they close.
Sun, have I not worshipped your strength and your
brightness! My torrid, gentle art, in its supreme
achievement has held you captive in the heart of
my poems; like a field of ripe wheat that surges
in the summer wind, this page and that of my
books confers life on you and exhalts you:
O Sun, who bring forth and deliver, O immense
friend of whom our pride has need, be it that at
the new, solemn and imperious hour when my old
human heart will be heavy under the proof, you
will come once more to visit it and witness.
XXV
Oh! how gentle are your hands and their slow
caress winding about my neck and gliding over my
body, when I tell you at the fall of evening how
my strength grows heavy day by day with the lead
of my weakness!
You do not wish me to become a shadow and a wreck
like those who go towards the darkness, even
though they carry a laurel in their mournful
hands and fame sleeping in their hollow chest.
Oh! how you soften the law of time for me, and
how comforting and generous to me is your dream;
for the first time, with an untruth you lull my
heart, that forgives you and thanks you for it,
Well knowing, nevertheless, that all ardour is
vain against all that is and all that must be,
and that, by finishing in your eyes my fine human
life, may perhaps be found a deep happiness.
XXVI
When you have closed my eyes to the light, kiss
them with a long kiss, for they will have given
you in the last look of their last fervour the
utmost passionate love.
Beneath the still radiance of the funeral torch,
bend down towards the farewell in them your sad
and beautiful face, so that the only image they
will keep in the tomb may be imprinted on them
and may endure.
And let me feel, before the coffin is nailed up,
our hands meet once again on the pure, white bed,
and your cheek rest one last time against my
forehead on the pale cushions.
And let me afterwards go far away with my heart,
which will preserve so fiery a love for you that
the other dead will feel its glow even through
the compact, dead earth!
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