Mallarme - Poems
.
No, but the soul
Void of words, and this heavy body,
Succumb to noon's proud silence slowly:
With no more ado, forgetting blasphemy, I
Must sleep, lying on the thirsty sand, and as I
Love, open my mouth to wine's true constellation!
Farewell to you, both: I go to see the shadow you have become.
Funeral Libation (At Gautier's Tomb)
To you, gone emblem of our happiness!
Greetings, in pale libation and madness,
Don't think to some hope of magic corridors I offer
My empty cup, where a monster of gold suffers!
Your apparition cannot satisfy me:
Since I myself entombed you in porphyry.
The rite decrees our hands must quench the torch
Against the iron mass of your tomb's porch:
None at this simple ceremony should forget,
Those chosen to sing the absence of the poet,
That this monument encloses him entire.
Were it not that his art's glory, full of fire
Till the dark communal moment all of ash,
Returns as proud evening's glow lights the glass,
To the fires of the pure mortal sun!
Marvellous, total, solitary, so that one
Trembles to breathe with man's false pride.
This haggard crowd! 'We are', it cries,
'Our future ghosts, their sad opacity. '
But with walls blazoned, mourning, empty,
I've scorned the lucid horror of a tear,
When, deaf to the sacred verse he does not fear,
One of those passers-by, mute, blind, proud,
Transmutes himself, a guest in his vague shroud,
Into the virgin hero of posthumous waiting.
A vast void carried through the fog's drifting,
By the angry wind of words he did not say,
Nothing, to this Man abolished yesterday:
'What is Earth, O you, memories of horizons? '
Shrieks the dream: and, a voice whose clarity lessens,
Space, has for its toy this cry: 'I do not know! '
The Master, with eye profound, as he goes,
Pacified the restless miracle of Eden,
Who alone woke, in his voice's final frisson,
The mystery of a name for the Lily and the Rose.
Is there anything of this destiny left, or no?
O, all of you, forget your darkened faith.
Glorious, eternal genius has no shade.
I, moved by your desire, wish to see
for Him who vanished yesterday, in the Ideal
Work that for us the garden of this star creates,
As a solemn agitation in the air, that stays
Honouring this quiet disaster, a stir
Of words, a drunken red, calyx, clear,
That, rain and diamonds, the crystal gaze
Fixed on these flowers of which none fade,
Isolates in the hour and the light of day!
That's all that's left already of our true play,
Where the pure poet's gesture, humble, vast
Must deny the dream, the enemy of his trust:
So that on the morning of his exalted stay,
When ancient death is for him as for Gautier,
The un-opening of sacred eyes, the being-still,
The solid tomb may rise, ornament this hill,
The sepulchre where lies the power to blight,
And miserly silence and the massive night.
The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe
Such as eternity at last transforms into Himself,
The Poet rouses with two-edged naked sword,
His century terrified at having ignored
Death triumphant in so strange a voice!
They, like a spasm of the Hydra, hearing the angel
Once grant a purer sense to the words of the tribe,
Loudly proclaimed it a magic potion, imbibed
From some tidal brew black, and dishonourable.
If our imagination can carve no bas-relief
From hostile soil and cloud, O grief,
With which to deck Poe's dazzling sepulchre,
Let your granite at least mark a boundary forever,
Calm block fallen here from some dark disaster,
To dark flights of Blasphemy scattered through the future.
The Tomb of Charles Baudelaire
The buried shrine shows at its sewer-mouth's
Sepulchral slobber of mud and rubies
Some abominable statue of Anubis,
The muzzle lit like a ferocious snout
Or as when a dubious wick twists in the new gas,
Wiping out, as we know, the insults suffered
Haggardly lighting an immortal pubis,
Whose flight roosts according to the lamp
What votive leaves, dried in cities without evening
Could bless, as she can, vainly sitting
Against the marble of Baudelaire
Shudderingly absent from the veil that clothes her
She, his Shade, a protective poisonous air
Always to be breathed, although we die of her.
Tomb (Of Verlaine)
Anniversary - January 1897
The black rock enraged that the north wind rolls it on
Will not halt itself, even under pious hands, still
Testing its resemblance to human ill,
As if to bless some fatal cast of bronze.
Here nearly always if the ring-dove coos
This immaterial grief with many a fold of cloud
Crushes the ripe star of tomorrows, whose crowd
Will be silvered by its scintillations. Who
Following the solitary leap
External once of our vagabond - seeks
Verlaine? He's hidden in the grass, Verlaine
Only to catch, naively, not drying with his breath
And without his lip drinking there, at peace again,
A shallow stream that's slandered, and named Death.
Prose
Hyperbole! From my memory
Triumphantly can't you
Rise today, like sorcery
From an iron-bound book or two:
Since, through science, I inscribe
The hymn of hearts so spiritual
In my patient work, inside
Atlas, herbal, ritual.
We walked set our face
(We were two, I maintain)
Toward the many charms of place,
Compared them, Sister, to yours again.
No, but the soul
Void of words, and this heavy body,
Succumb to noon's proud silence slowly:
With no more ado, forgetting blasphemy, I
Must sleep, lying on the thirsty sand, and as I
Love, open my mouth to wine's true constellation!
Farewell to you, both: I go to see the shadow you have become.
Funeral Libation (At Gautier's Tomb)
To you, gone emblem of our happiness!
Greetings, in pale libation and madness,
Don't think to some hope of magic corridors I offer
My empty cup, where a monster of gold suffers!
Your apparition cannot satisfy me:
Since I myself entombed you in porphyry.
The rite decrees our hands must quench the torch
Against the iron mass of your tomb's porch:
None at this simple ceremony should forget,
Those chosen to sing the absence of the poet,
That this monument encloses him entire.
Were it not that his art's glory, full of fire
Till the dark communal moment all of ash,
Returns as proud evening's glow lights the glass,
To the fires of the pure mortal sun!
Marvellous, total, solitary, so that one
Trembles to breathe with man's false pride.
This haggard crowd! 'We are', it cries,
'Our future ghosts, their sad opacity. '
But with walls blazoned, mourning, empty,
I've scorned the lucid horror of a tear,
When, deaf to the sacred verse he does not fear,
One of those passers-by, mute, blind, proud,
Transmutes himself, a guest in his vague shroud,
Into the virgin hero of posthumous waiting.
A vast void carried through the fog's drifting,
By the angry wind of words he did not say,
Nothing, to this Man abolished yesterday:
'What is Earth, O you, memories of horizons? '
Shrieks the dream: and, a voice whose clarity lessens,
Space, has for its toy this cry: 'I do not know! '
The Master, with eye profound, as he goes,
Pacified the restless miracle of Eden,
Who alone woke, in his voice's final frisson,
The mystery of a name for the Lily and the Rose.
Is there anything of this destiny left, or no?
O, all of you, forget your darkened faith.
Glorious, eternal genius has no shade.
I, moved by your desire, wish to see
for Him who vanished yesterday, in the Ideal
Work that for us the garden of this star creates,
As a solemn agitation in the air, that stays
Honouring this quiet disaster, a stir
Of words, a drunken red, calyx, clear,
That, rain and diamonds, the crystal gaze
Fixed on these flowers of which none fade,
Isolates in the hour and the light of day!
That's all that's left already of our true play,
Where the pure poet's gesture, humble, vast
Must deny the dream, the enemy of his trust:
So that on the morning of his exalted stay,
When ancient death is for him as for Gautier,
The un-opening of sacred eyes, the being-still,
The solid tomb may rise, ornament this hill,
The sepulchre where lies the power to blight,
And miserly silence and the massive night.
The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe
Such as eternity at last transforms into Himself,
The Poet rouses with two-edged naked sword,
His century terrified at having ignored
Death triumphant in so strange a voice!
They, like a spasm of the Hydra, hearing the angel
Once grant a purer sense to the words of the tribe,
Loudly proclaimed it a magic potion, imbibed
From some tidal brew black, and dishonourable.
If our imagination can carve no bas-relief
From hostile soil and cloud, O grief,
With which to deck Poe's dazzling sepulchre,
Let your granite at least mark a boundary forever,
Calm block fallen here from some dark disaster,
To dark flights of Blasphemy scattered through the future.
The Tomb of Charles Baudelaire
The buried shrine shows at its sewer-mouth's
Sepulchral slobber of mud and rubies
Some abominable statue of Anubis,
The muzzle lit like a ferocious snout
Or as when a dubious wick twists in the new gas,
Wiping out, as we know, the insults suffered
Haggardly lighting an immortal pubis,
Whose flight roosts according to the lamp
What votive leaves, dried in cities without evening
Could bless, as she can, vainly sitting
Against the marble of Baudelaire
Shudderingly absent from the veil that clothes her
She, his Shade, a protective poisonous air
Always to be breathed, although we die of her.
Tomb (Of Verlaine)
Anniversary - January 1897
The black rock enraged that the north wind rolls it on
Will not halt itself, even under pious hands, still
Testing its resemblance to human ill,
As if to bless some fatal cast of bronze.
Here nearly always if the ring-dove coos
This immaterial grief with many a fold of cloud
Crushes the ripe star of tomorrows, whose crowd
Will be silvered by its scintillations. Who
Following the solitary leap
External once of our vagabond - seeks
Verlaine? He's hidden in the grass, Verlaine
Only to catch, naively, not drying with his breath
And without his lip drinking there, at peace again,
A shallow stream that's slandered, and named Death.
Prose
Hyperbole! From my memory
Triumphantly can't you
Rise today, like sorcery
From an iron-bound book or two:
Since, through science, I inscribe
The hymn of hearts so spiritual
In my patient work, inside
Atlas, herbal, ritual.
We walked set our face
(We were two, I maintain)
Toward the many charms of place,
Compared them, Sister, to yours again.
