No More Learning

She's delicate

With a long pale face.

Oh! How I love Kate!

It's Saint Valentine's Day!

I must, I don't dare

Tomorrow, they say. . .

It's a dreadful affair

Is Saint Valentine's Day!

She's promised to me,

Fortuitously!

But the difficulty

For a lover, poor he,

With his darling to be!

Poetic Art

For Charles Morice

Music above everything,

The Imbalanced preferred

Vaguer more soluble in air

Nothing weighty, fixed therein.

And don't go choosing your words

Without some confusion of vision:

Nothing's dearer than shadowy verse

Where precision weds indecision.

It's beautiful eyes hidden by veils,

It's broad day quivering at noon,

It's the blue disorder of clear stars

In an autumn, cool, with no moon!

For we always desire Nuance,

Not Colour, nuance evermore!

Oh, nuance alone can wed

Dream with dream, and flute to horn!
From murderous Epigrams flee,

Cruel Wit and Laughter impure

That brings tears to the high Azure,

And all that base garlic cuisine!

Take eloquence, wring its neck!

You'd do well, while you're in flow,

To make Rhyme a fraction wiser.

If we don't watch out, where will it go?

Oh who'll tell of the wrongs of Rhyme?

What mad Negro, or tone-deaf child,

Created this penny jewel, this crime,

That rings hollow, false under the file?

Music once more and forever!

Let your line be a thing so light,

It feels like a soul that soars in flight

To new skies and fresh lovers.

Let your line be the finest adventure

Afloat on the tense dawn wind

That goes wakening thyme and mint. . .

All the rest - is literature.

Jules Laforgue (1860-1887)

Jules Laforgue

'Jules Laforgue'
1885, Wikimedia Commons

Pierrots

Emerges, on a taut neck,

From a starched ruff idem

A beardless face, cold-creamed,

A beanpole: hydrocephalic.

The eyes are drowned in opium

In universal licence

The clownish mouth bewitched

A singular geranium.

A mouth, now bottomless pit

Glacially screeching laughter,

Now a transcendental opening,

Vain smile of La Gioconda.

Planting their floury cones

On a black silk cut-throat's scarf,

They'll make their crow's-feet laugh

And wrinkle their trefoil noses.