One's ardour, Nature, makes you bright, One finds within you mourning, grief! What speaks to one of tombs and death Says to the other, Splendour! Life!
Alone at last! Nothing is to be heard but the rattle of a few tardy and tired-out cabs. There will be silence now, if not repose, for several hours at least....
Do you, as I do, know a zesty grief, And is it said of you, 'curious man!' I dreamed of dying; in my spirit's heat Desire and horror mixed, a strange mischance; ...
Now those days arrive when, stem throbbing, each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer: sounds and scents twine in the evening air: languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!
O fleece, billowing even down the neck! O locks! 0 perfume charged with nonchalance! What ecstasy! To people our dark room With memories that sleep within this mane, I'll shake it like a kerchief in the air!...
I have not forgotten our little white retreat Where we were neighbors to the town of busy streets; Our plaster Venus and Pomona barely could Conceal their nakedness within our meagre wood....
I love the thought of ancient, naked days When Phoebus gilded statues with his rays. Then women, men in their agility Played without guile, without anxiety, And, while the sky stroked lovingly their skin,...
I've not forgotten, near to the town, our white house, small but alone: its Pomona of plaster, its Venus of old hiding nude limbs in the meagre grove, and the sun, superb, at evening, streaming,...
Great forests you frighten me, like vast cathedrals: You roar like an organ, and in our condemned souls, aisles of eternal mourning, where past death-rattles sound, the echo of your De Profundis rolls. ...
The poet in his cell, unkempt and sick, who crushes underfoot a manuscript, measures, with a gaze that horror has inflamed, the stair of madness where his soul was maimed. ...
They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes: "Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?" Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise All save that antique brute-like faith of thine; ...
The moon tonight dreams vacantly, as if She were a beauty cushioned at her rest Who strokes with wandering hand her lifting Nipples, and the contour of her breasts; ...
That kind heart you were jealous of, my nurse Who sleeps her sleep beneath the humble turf, I'd like to give her flowers, wouldn't you? The dead, the poor dead, have their sorrows too,...