No More Learning

Blonde or brunette

Must we select?

Pleasure is

The god of this world.

El Desdichado (The Disinherited)

I am the darkness - the widower - the un-consoled,

The prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower;

My sole star is dead - and my constellated lute

Bears the black sun of Melancholy.

You who consoled me in funereal night,

Bring me Posilipo, the sea of Italy,

The flower that pleased my grieving heart,

And the trellis where the vine entwines the rose.

Am I Phoebus or Love? . . . Biron or Lusignan?

My brow's still red from the queen's kiss;

I dreamed in the grotto where Sirens swim. . .

And twice victorious crossed Acheron:

Plucking from Orpheus' lyre one by one

The saintly sighs and the faerie cries.

Note: The Spanish title was the motto adopted by the disinherited Ivanhoe in Scott's novel. The Hill of Posilipo is situated to the west of the city of Naples, and is the site of Virgil's tomb.
Biron was a friend of Henri IV, Lusignan a famous family, both associated with the Valois. A number of personal references are best pursued by reading a biography of Nerval, of his early meeting with 'Adrienne' and later relationship with the actress Jenny Colon.

Myrtho

Myrtho, I think of you divine enchantress,

And of proud Posilipo, lit with a thousand fires,

Of your brow flooded with Eastern light,

And the black grapes twined in your golden hair.

It was in your cup I drank intoxication,

When they saw me praying at Iacchus' feet,

And from your laughing eyes' secret lightening,

For the Muses made me one of the sons of Greece.

I know why the volcano erupts once more. . .

You stirred it with agile foot, but yesterday,

And suddenly ash drowned the horizon's circle.

Since a Norman duke broke your gods of clay,

Eternally, beneath Virgil's laurel spray,

The pale hydrangea is wed to the green myrtle.

Note: Myrtho a shining mask of Venus Murcia to whom myrtle was sacred, is the counterpart to the dark prince of El Desdichado. Alchemically she is De Nerval's feminine principle to be fused with the masculine. Iacchus was an epithet of the god Dionysus (Bacchus) and the name of the torch-bearer at the Eleusinian mysteries, herald of the child born of the underworld.

Horus

Trembling Kneph, the god, shook the starry ways:

Isis, the mother, then raised herself from her bed,

Made, to her savage spouse, a sign of hatred,

In her green eyes shone the passion of elder days.

'Do you see him, she cried, the old lecher dies;

Through his mouth the frosts of earth take flight;

Bind his lame feet, destroy his squinting sight,

He's the god of craters, king of the winter's ice!

The new spirit summons, the eagle is done,

Cybele's robe for him do I now put on. .