Chapter IV: Epilogue

Than farthest stars more distant,
A mile more,
A mile more,
A voice cries on insistent:
"You may smile more if you will;

"You may sing too and spring too;
But numb at last
And dumb at last,
Whatever port you cling to,
You must come at last to a hill.

"And never a man you'll find there
To take your hand
And shake your hand;
But when you go behind there
You must make your hand a sword

"To fence with a foeman swarthy,
And swink there
Nor shrink there,
Though cowardly and worthy
Must drink there one reward."

TWELVE

TRANSLATIONS

FROM

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

TOUT ENTIÈRE

This morning in my attic high
The Demon came to visit me,
And seeking faults in my reply,
He said: "I would inquire of thee,

"Of all the beauties which compose
Her charming body's potent spell,
Of all the objects black and rose
Which make the thing you love so well,

"Which is the sweetest?" O my soul!
Thou didst rejoin: "How tell of parts,
When all I know is that the whole
Works magic in my heart of hearts?

"Where all is fair, how should I say
What single grace is my delight?
She shines on me like break of day
And she consoles me as the night.

"There flows through all her perfect frame
A harmony too exquisite
That weak analysis should name
The numberless accords of it.

"O mystic metamorphosis!
My separate senses all are blent;
Within her breath soft music is,
And in her voice a subtle scent!"

THE ALCHEMY OF GRIEF

One, Nature! burns and makes thee bright,
One gives thee weeds to mourn withal;
And what to one is burial
Is to the other life and light.

The unknown Hermes who assists
And alway fills my heart with fear
Makes me the mighty Midas' peer
The saddest of the alchemists.

Through him I make gold changeable
To dross, and paradise to hell;
Clouds for its corpse-cloths I descry.

A stark dead body I love well,
And in the gleaming fields on high
I build immense sarcophagi.

SPLEEN

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon's line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night;

When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank
Where batlike Hope goes blindly fluttering
And, striking wall and roof and mouldered plank,
Bruises his tender head and timid wing;

When like grim prison-bars stretch down the thin,
Straight, rigid pillars of the endless rain,
And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin
Their meshes in the caverns of the brain;--

Suddenly, bells leap forth into the air,
Hurling a hideous uproar to the sky
As 'twere a band of homeless spirits who fare
Through the strange heavens, wailing stubbornly.

And hearses, without drum or instrument,
File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful,
Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent,
Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.

A VOYAGE TO CYTHERA

My heart was like a bird and took to flight,
Around the rigging circling joyously;
The ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky
Like a great angel drunken with the light.

"What is yon isle, sad and funereal?"
"Cythera famed in deathless song," said they,
"The gay old bachelors' Eldorado-Nay,
Look! 'tis a poor bare country after all!"

Isle of sweet secrets and heart banquetings!
The queenly shade of antique Venus thrills
Scentlike above thy level seas and fills
Our souls with languor and all amorous things.

Fair isle and of green myrtles and blown flowers
Held holy by all men for evermore,
Where the faint sighs of spirits that adore
Float like rose-incense through the quiet hours,

And dovelike sounds each murmured orison:--
Cythera lay there barren 'neath bright skies,
A rocky waste rent by discordant cries:
Natheless I saw a curious thing thereon.

No shady temple was it, close enshrined
I' the trees; no flower-crowned priestess hither came
With her young body burnt by secret flame,
Baring her breast to the caressing wind;

But when so close to the land's edge we drew
Our canvas scared the sea-fowl--gradually
We knew it for a three-branched gallows tree
Like a black cypress stark against the blue.

A rotten carcase hung, whereon did sit
A swarm of foul black birds; with writhe and shriek
Each sought to pierce and plunge his knife-like beak
Deep in the bleeding trunk and limbs of it.

The eyes were holes; the belly opened wide
Streaming its heavy entrails on the thighs;
The grim birds, gorged with dreadful delicacies,
Had dug and furrowed it on every side.

Beneath the blackened feet there strove and pressed
A herd of jealous beasts with upward snout,
And in the midst of these there turned about
One, the chief hangman, larger than the rest....

Lone Cytherean! now all silently
Thou sufferest these insults to atone
For those old infamous sins that thou hast known,
The sins that locked the gate o' the grave to thee.

Mine are thy sorrows, ludicrous corse; yea, all
Are mine! I stood thy swaying limbs beneath,
And, like a bitter vomit, to my teeth
There rose old shadows in a stream of gall.

O thou unhappy devil, I felt afresh,
Gazing at thee, the beaks and jaws of those
Black savage panthers and those ruthless crows,
Who loved of old to macerate my flesh.

The sea was calm, the sky without a cloud;
Henceforth for me all things that came to pass
Were blood and darkness,--round my heart, alas!
There clung that allegory, like a shroud.

Naught save mine image on a gibbet thrust
Found I on Venus island desolate....
Ah, God! the courage and strength to contemplate
My body and my heart without disgust.

THE CRACKED BELL

'Tis bitter-sweet, when winter nights are long,
To watch, beside the flames which smoke and twist,
The distant memories which slowly throng,
Brought by the chime soft-singing through the mist.

Happy the sturdy, vigorous-throated bell
Who, spite of age alert and confident,
Cries hourly, like some strong old sentinel
Flinging the ready challenge from his tent.

For me, my soul is cracked; when sick with care,
She strives with songs to people the cold air
It happens often that her feeble cries

Mock the harsh rattle of a man who lies
Wounded, forgotten, 'neath a mound of slain
And dies, pinned fast, writhing his limbs in pain.

THE OFFENDED MOON

O moon, O lamp of hill and secret dale!
Thou whom our fathers, ages out of mind,
Worshipped in thy blue heaven, whilst behind
Thy stars streamed after thee a glittering trail,

Dost see the poet, weary-eyed and pale,
Or lovers on their happy beds reclined,
Showing white teeth in sleep, or vipers twined,
'Neath the dry sward; or in a golden veil

Stealest thou with faint footfall o'er the grass
As of old, to kiss from twilight unto dawn
The faded charms of thine Endymion?...

"O child of this sick century, I see
Thy grey-haired mother leering in her glass
And plastering the breast that suckled thee!"

TO THEODORE DE BANVILLE,

1842

So proud your port, your arm so powerful,
With such a grip you grip the goddess' hair,
That one might take you, from your casual air,
For a young ruffian flinging down his trull.

Your clear eye flashing with precocity,
You have displayed yourself proud architect
Of fabrics so audaciously correct
That we may guess what your ripe prime will be.

Poet, our blood ebbs out through every pore;
Is it, perchance, the robe the Centaur bore,
Which made a sullen streamlet of each vein,

Was three times dipped within the venom fell
Of those old reptiles fierce and terrible
Whom, in his cradle, Hercules had slain?

MUSIC

Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea,
Bears me towards my pale
Star: in clear space, or 'neath a vaporous canopy
On-floating, I set sail.

With heaving chest which strains forward, and lungs outblown,
I climb the ridgèd steeps
Of those high-pilèd clouds which 'thwart the night are thrown,
Veiling its starry deeps.

I suffer all the throes, within my quivering form,
Of a great ship in pain,
Now a soft wind, and now the writhings of a storm

Upon the vasty main
Rock me: at other times a death-like calm, the bare
Mirror of my despair.

THE CATS

The lover and the stern philosopher
Both love, in their ripe time, the confident
Soft cats, the house's chiefest ornament,
Who like themselves are cold and seldom stir.

Of knowledge and of pleasure amorous,
Silence they seek and Darkness' fell domain;
Had not their proud souls scorned to brook his rein,
They would have made grim steeds for Erebus.

Pensive they rest in noble attitudes
Like great stretched sphinxes in vast solitudes
Which seem to sleep wrapt in an endless dream;

Their fruitful loins are full of sparks divine,
And gleams of gold within their pupils shine
As 'twere within the shadow of a stream.

THE SADNESS OF THE MOON

This evening the Moon dreams more languidly,
Like a beauty who on mounded cushions rests,
And with her light hand fondles lingeringly,
Before she sleeps, the slope of her sweet breasts.

On her soft satined avalanches' height
Dying, she laps herself for hours and hours
In long, long swoons, and gazes at the white
Visions which rise athwart the blue like flowers.

When sometimes in her perfect indolence
She lets a furtive tear steal gently thence,
Some pious poet, a lone, sleepless one,

Takes in his hollowed hand this gem, shot through,
Like an opal stone, with gleams of every hue,
And in his heart's depths hides it from the sun.

MOESTA ET ERRABUNDA

Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache,
Plunged in this squalid city's filthy sea,
For another ocean where the splendours break
Blue, clear, and deep as is virginity.
Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache?

The sea, the sea unending, comforts us!
What demon gave the hoarse old sea who sings
To her mumbling hurricanes' organ thunderous
The god-like power to cradle sorrowful things?
The sea, the sea unending, comforts us.

Carry me, wagon, bear me, barque, away!
Far! Far! For here the mud is made of tears!
Does Agatha's sad heart not sometimes say:
"O far from shudderings and crimes and fears,
Carry me, wagon; bear me barque, away?"

How far thou art, O scented paradise,
O paradise where all is love and joy,
Where all is worthy love 'neath the azure skies,
And the heart drowns in bliss without alloy!
How far thou art, O scented paradise!

But the green paradise of childish loves,
The games, the songs, the kisses and the flowers,
The laughing draughts of wine in hidden groves,
The violins throbbing through the twilight hours,
--But the green paradise of childish loves,

The artless paradise of stealthy joys,
Is that already leagues beyond Cathay?
And can one, with a little plaintive noise,
Bring it again that is so far away--
The artless paradise of stealthy joys?

THE OWLS

'Neath their black yews in solemn state
The owls are sitting in a row
Like foreign gods; and even so
Blink their red eyes; they meditate.

Quite motionless they hold them thus
Until at last the day is done,
And driving down the slanting sun,
The sad night is victorious.

They teach the wise who gives them ear
That in this world he most should fear
All things which loud or restless be.

Who, dazzled by a passing shade,
Follows it, never will be free
Till the dread penalty be paid.

FINIS

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