No More Learning

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.

For gem-stoned rings, on hand,

They've Egyptian scarabs,

In well-cut buttonholes,

Dandelions from the wasteland.

They go, eating the azure,

Sometimes vegetables too,

Hard-boiled eggs, and mandarins,

And rice as white as their costume.

They're of the Pallid sect,

They've nothing to do with God at all.

And whistle: All's for the best

In this best of Carnivals! '

Pierrot's Speech

A lunar reveller simply

Making circles in ponds,

I've no designs beyond

Becoming legendary.

Gathering up with defiance

My pale-mandarin's sleeves

I puff out my mouth - and breathe

Gentle Christian advice.

Ah, yes, to become legendary, too,

On the brink of a charlatan age!

But where are last year's Moons?

And why can't God be re-made?

Pierrot's Melancholy

On the first day, I drink their bored eyes complete. . .

And I would kiss their feet

To death.