Works

How I adore, dear indolent,
Your lovely body, when
Like silken cloth it shimmers
Your sleek and glimmering skin!

Within the ocean of your hair,
All pungent with perfumes,...

How many times must I jingle my little bells
And kiss your ugly forehead, shabby substitute?
How many, 0 my quiver, spears and bolts to lose
Trying to hit the target, nature's mystic self?
...

We will have beds imbued with mildest scent,
And couches, deep as tombs, in which to lie,
Flowers around us, strange and opulent,
Blooming on shelves under the finest skies.
...

It is death that consoles and allows us to live.
Alas! that life's end should be all of our hope;
It goes to our heads like a powerful drink,
And gives us the heart to walk into the dark;
...

Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this desire....

I


In the anatomical plates
displayed on the dusty quays
where many a dry book sleeps
mummified, as in ancient days,


drawings to which the gravity...

A chamber that is like a reverie; a chamber truly spiritual, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly touched with rose and blue....

Above the valleys, over rills and meres,
Above the mountains, woods, the oceans, clouds,
Beyond the sun, past all ethereal bounds,
Beyond the borders of the starry spheres,
...

My youth was nothing but a black storm
Crossed now and then by brilliant suns.
The thunder and the rain so ravage the shores
Nothing's left of the fruit my garden held once.
...

The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls
Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,
And, seeing these, the pious in those halls
Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.
...

You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
...

There are some powerful odours that can pass
Out of the stoppard flagon; even glass
To them is porous. Oft when some old box
Brought from the East is opened and the locks...

It's bitter, yet sweet, on wintry nights,
near to the fire that crackles and fumes,
listening while, far-off, slow memories rise
to echoing chimes that ring through the gloom.
...

Sometimes it seems my blood spurts out in gobs
As if it were a fountain's pulsing sobs;
I clearly hear it mutter as it goes,
Yet cannot find the wound from which it flows.
...

Old courtesans in washed-out armchairs,
pale, eyebrows blacked, eyes 'tender', 'fatal',
simpering still, and from their skinny ears
loosing their waterfalls of stone and metal:

...

Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
I will return to thy alcove,
And glide upon the night to thee,
Treading the shadows silently.

And I will give to thee, my own,
Kisses as icy as the moon,...

In times when madcap Nature in her verve
Conceived each day a hatch of monstrous spawn,
I might have lived near some young giantess,
Like a voluptuous cat before a queen
...

The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in at the window as you slept in your cradle, and said to herself:
"I am well pleased with this child."...

There are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action, who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves incapable. Such a...

In a rich land, fertile, replete with snails
I'd like to dig myself a spacious pit
Where I might spread at leisure myoid bones
And sleep unnoticed, like a shark at sea.
...