The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Poems, by Émile Verhaeren This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: The Love Poems (From Les Heures claires, Les Heures d'après-midi, Les Heures du Soir) Author: Émile Verhaeren Translator: Frank Stuart Flint Release Date: April 24, 2014 [EBook #45470] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOVE POEMS *** Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) THE LOVE POEMS OF ÉMILE VERHAEREN TRANSLATED BY F. S. FLINT LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. 1916 À CELLE QUI VIT À MES CÔTÉS CONTENTS THE SHINING HOURS I. O the splendour of our joy II. Although we saw this bright garden III. This barbaric capital, whereon monsters writhe IV. The sky has unfolded into night V. Each hour I brood upon your goodness VI. Sometimes you wear the kindly grace VII. Oh! let the passing hand VIII. As in the simple ages IX. Young and kindly spring X. Come with slow steps XI. How readily delight is aroused in her XII. At the time when I had long suffered XIII. And what matters the wherefores XIV. In my dreams, I sometimes pair you XV. I dedicate to your tears XVI. I drown my entire soul in your two eyes XVII. To love with our eyes XVIII. In the garden of our love XIX. May your bright eyes, your eyes of summer XX. Tell me, my simple and tranquil sweetheart XXI. During those hours wherein we are lost XXII. Oh! this happiness, sometimes so rare XXIII. Let us, in our love and ardour XXIV. So soon as our lips touch XXV. To prevent the escape of any part of us XXVI. Although autumn this evening XXVII. The gift of the body when the soul is given XXVIII. Was there in us one fondness XXIX. The lovely garden blossoming with flames XXX. If it should ever happen that THE HOURS OF AFTERNOON I. Step by step, day by day II. Roses of June, you the fairest III. If other flowers adorn the house IV. The darkness is lustral V. I bring you this evening, as an offering VI. Let us both sit down on the old worm-eaten bench VII. Gently, more gently still VIII. In the house chosen by our love IX. The pleasant task with the window open X. In the depth of our love dwells all faith XI. Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars XII. This is the holy hour when the lamp is lit XIII. The dead kisses of departed years XIV. For fifteen years XV. I thought our joy benumbed for ever XVI. Everything that lives about us XVII. Because you came one day XVIII. On days of fresh and tranquil health XIX. Out of the groves of sleep I came XX. Alas! when the lead of illness XXI. Our bright garden is health itself XXII. It was June in the garden XXIII. The gift of yourself XXIV. Oh! the calm summer garden where nothing moves! XXV. As with others, an hour has its ill-humour XXVI. The golden barks of lovely summer XXVII. Ardour of senses, ardour of hearts XXVIII. The still beauty of summer evenings XXIX. You said to me, one evening XXX. "Hours of bright morning" THE HOURS OF EVENING I. Dainty flowers, like a froth of foam II. If it were true that a garden flower III. The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead IV. Draw up your chair near mine V. Be once more merciful and cheering to us, light VI. Alas! the days of the crimson phlox VII. The evening falls, the moon is golden VIII. When your hand IX. And now that the lofty leaves have fallen X. When the starry sky covers our dwelling XI. With the same love that you were for me XII. The flowers of bright welcome XIII. When the fine snow with its sparkling grains XIV. If fate has saved us from commonplace errors XV. No, my heart has never tired of you XVI. How happy we are still XVII. Shall we suffer, alas! the dead weight of the years XVIII. The small happenings, the thousand nothings XIX. Come even to our threshold XX. When our bright garden was gay XXI. With my old hands lifted to your forehead XXII. If our hearts have burned XXIII. In this rugged winter XXIV. Perhaps, when my last day comes XXV. Oh! how gentle are your hands XXVI. When you have closed my eyes to the light THE SHINING HOURS I O the splendour of our joy, woven of gold in the silken air! Here is our pleasant house and its airy gables, and the garden and the orchard. Here is the bench beneath the apple-trees, whence the white spring is shed in slow, caressing petals. Here flights of luminous wood-pigeons, like harbingers, soar in the clear sky of the countryside. Here, kisses fallen upon earth from the mouth of the frail azure, are two blue ponds, simple and pure, artlessly bordered with involuntary flowers. O the splendour of our joy and of ourselves in this garden where we live upon our emblems. II Although we saw this bright garden, wherein we pass silently, flower before our eyes, it is rather in us that grows the pleasantest and fairest garden in the world. For we live all the flowers, all the plants and all the grasses in our laughter and our tears of pure and calm happiness. For we live all the transparencies of the blue pond that reflects the rich growths of the golden roses and the great vermilion lilies, sun-lips and mouths. For we live all joy, thrown out in the cries of festival and spring of our avowals, wherein heartfelt and uplifting words sing side by side. Oh! is it not indeed in us that grows the pleasantest and the gladdest garden in the world? III This barbaric capital, whereon monsters writhe, soldered together by the might of claw and tooth, in a mad whirl of blood, of fiery cries, of wounds, and of jaws that bite and bite again, This was myself before you were mine, you who are new and old, and who, from the depths of your eternity, came to me with passion and kindness in your hands. I feel the same deep, deep things sleeping in you as in me, and our thirst for remembrance drink up the echo in which our pasts answer each to each. Our eyes must have wept at the same hours, without our knowing, during childhood, have had the same terrors, the same happinesses, the same flashes of trust; For I am bound to you by the unknown that watched me of old down the avenues through which my adventurous life passed; and, indeed, if I had looked more closely, I might have seen, long ago, within its eyes your own eyes open. IV The sky has unfolded into night, and the moon seems to watch over the sleeping silence. All is so pure and clear; all is so pure and so pale in the air and on the lakes of the friendly countryside, that there is anguish in the fall from a reed of a drop of water, that tinkles and then is silent in the water. But I have your hands between mine and your steadfast eyes that hold me so gently with their earnestness; and I feel that you are so much at peace with everything that nothing, not even a fleeting suspicion of fear, will overcast, be it but for a moment, the holy trust that sleeps in us as an infant rests. V Each hour I brood upon your goodness, so simple in its depth, I lose myself in prayers to you. I came so late towards the gentleness of your eyes, and from so far towards your two hands stretched out quietly over the wide spaces. I had in me so much stubborn rust that gnawed my confidence with its ravenous teeth. I was so heavy, was so tired, I was so old with misgiving. I was so heavy, I was so tired of the vain road of all my footsteps. I deserved so little the wondrous joy of seeing your feet illuminate my path that I am still trembling and almost in tears, and humble, for ever and ever, before my happiness. VI Sometimes you wear the kindly grace of the garden in early morning that, quiet and winding, unfolds in the blue distances its pleasant paths, curved like the necks of swans. And, at other times, you are for me the bright thrill of the swift, exalting wind that passes with its lightning fingers through the watery mane of the white pond. At the good touch of your two hands, I feel as though leaves were caressing me lightly; and, when midday burns the garden, the shadows at once gather up the dear words with which your being trembled. Thus, thanks to you, each moment seems to pass in me divinely; so, at the hour of wan night, when you hide within yourself, shutting your eyes, you feel my gentle, devout gaze, humbler and longer than a prayer, thank yours beneath your closed eyelids. VII Oh! let the passing hand knock with its futile fingers on the door; our hour is so unique, and the rest—what matters the rest with its futile fingers? Let dismal, tiresome joy keep to the road and pass on with its rattles in its hand. Let laughter swell and clatter and die away; let the crowd pass with its thousands of voices. The moment is so lovely with light in the garden about us; the moment is so rare with virgin light in our heart deep down in us. Everything tells us to expect nothing more from that which comes or passes, with tired songs and weary arms, on the roads, And to remain the meek who bless the day, even when night is before us barricaded with darkness, loving in ourselves above all else the idea that, gently, we conceive of our love. VIII As in the simple ages, I have given you my heart, like a wide-spreading flower that opens pure and lovely in the dewy hours; within its moist petals my lips have rested. The flower, I gathered it with fingers of flame; say nothing to it: for all words are perilous; it is through the eyes that soul listens to soul. The flower that is my heart and my avowal confides in all simplicity to your lips that it is loyal, bright and good, and that we trust in virgin love as a child trusts in God. Leave wit to flower on the hills in freakish paths of vanity; and let us give a simple welcome to the sincerity that holds our two true hearts within its crystalline hands; Nothing is so lovely as a confession of souls one to the other, in the evening, when the flame of the uncountable diamonds burns like so many silent eyes the silence of the firmaments. IX Young and kindly spring who clothes our garden with beauty makes lucid our voices and words, and steeps them in his limpidity. The breeze and the lips of the leaves babble, and slowly shed in us the syllables of their brightness. But the best in us turns away and flees material words; a mute and mild and simple rapture, better than all speech, moors our happiness to its true heaven: The rapture of your soul, kneeling in all simplicity before mine, and of my soul, kneeling in gentleness before yours. X Come with slow steps and sit near the gardenbed, whose flowers of tranquil light are shut by evening; let the great night filter through you: we are too happy for our prayer to be disturbed by its sea of dread. Above, the pure crystal of the stars is lit up; behold the firmament clearer and more translucent than a blue pond or the stained-glass window in an apse; and then behold heaven that gazes through. The thousand voices of the vast mystery speak around you; the thousand laws of all nature are in movement about you; the silver bows of the invisible take your soul and its fervour for target, But you are not afraid, oh! simple heart, you are not afraid, since your faith is that the whole earth works in harmony with that love that brought forth in you life and its mystery. Clasp then your hands tranquilly, and adore gently; a great counsel of purity floats like a strange dawn beneath the midnights of the firmament. XI How readily delight is aroused in her, with her eyes of fiery ecstasy, she who is gentle and resigned before life in so simple a fashion. This evening, how a look surprised her fervour and a word transported her to the pure garden of gladness, where she was at once both queen and servant. Humble of herself, but aglow with our two selves, she vied with me in kneeling to gather the wondrous happiness that overflowed mutually from our hearts. We listened to the dying down in us of the violence of the exalting love imprisoned in our arms, and to the living silence that said words we did not know. XII At the time when I had long suffered and the hours were snares to me, you appeared to me as the welcoming light that shines from the windows on to the snow in the depths of winter evenings. The brightness of your hospitable soul touched my heart lightly without wounding it, like a hand of tranquil warmth. Then came a holy trust, and an open heart, and affection, and the union at last of our two loving hands, one evening of clear understanding and of gentle calm. Since then, although summer has followed frost both in ourselves and beneath the sky whose eternal flames deck with gold all the paths of our thoughts; And although our love has become an immense flower, springing from proud desire, that ever begins anew within our heart, to grow yet better; I still look back on the small light that was sweet to me, the first. XIII And what matters the wherefores and the reasons, and who we were and who we are; all doubt is dead in this garden of blossoms that opens up in us and about us, so far from men. I do not argue, and do not desire to know, and nothing will disturb what is but mystery and gentle raptures and involuntary fervour and tranquil soaring towards our heaven of hope. I feel your brightness before understanding that you are so; and it is my gladness, infinitely, to perceive myself thus gently loving without asking why your voice calls me. Let us be simple and good—and day be minister of light and affection to us; and let them say that life is not made for a love like ours. XIV In my dreams, I sometimes pair you with those queens who slowly descend the golden, flowered stairways of legend; I give you names that are married with beauty, splendour and gladness, and that rustle in silken syllables along verses built as a platform for the dance of words and their stately pageantries. But how quickly I tire of the game, seeing you gentle and wise, and so little like those whose attitudes men embellish. Your brow, so shining and pure and white with certitude, your gentle, childlike hands peaceful upon your knees, your breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of your pulse that beats like your immense, ingenuous heart, Oh! how everything, except that and your prayer, oh! how everything is poor and empty, except the light that gazes at me and welcomes me in your naked eyes. XV I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, my gentlest thoughts, those I tell you, those also that remain undefined and too deep to tell. I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, to your whole soul, my soul, with its tears and its smiles and its kiss. See, the dawn whitens the ground that is the colour of lees of wine; shadowy bonds seem to slip and glide away with melancholy; the water of the ponds grows bright and sifts its noise; the grass glitters and the flowers open, and the golden woods free themselves from the night. Oh! what if we could one day enter thus into the full light; oh, what if we could one day, with conquering cries and lofty prayers, with no more veils upon us and no more remorse in us, oh! what if we could one day enter together into lucid love. XVI I drown my entire soul in your two eyes, and the mad rapture of that frenzied soul, so that, having been steeped in their gentleness and prayer, it may be returned to me brighter and of truer temper. O for a union that refines the being, as two golden windows in the same apse cross their differently lucent fires and interpenetrate! I am sometimes so heavy, so weary of being one who cannot be perfect, as he would! My heart struggles with its desires, my heart whose evil weeds, between the rocks of stubbornness, rear slyly their inky or burning flowers; My heart, so false, so true, as the day may be, my contradictory heart, my heart ever exaggerated with immense joy or with criminal fear. XVII To love with our eyes, let us lave our gaze of the gaze of those whose glances we have crossed, by thousands, in life that is evil and enthralled. The dawn is of flowers and dew and the mildest sifted light; soft plumes of silver and sun seem through the mists to brush and caress the mosses in the garden. Our blue and marvellous ponds quiver and come to life with shimmering gold; emerald wings pass under the trees; and the brightness sweeps from the roads, the garths and the hedges the damp ashen fog in which the twilight still lingers. XVIII In the garden of our love, summer still goes on: yonder, a golden peacock crosses an avenue; petals—pearls, emeralds, turquoises —deck the uniform slumber of the green swards. Our blue ponds shimmer, covered with the white kiss of the snowy water-lilies; in the quincunxes, our currant bushes follow one another in procession; an iridescent insect teases the heart of a flower; the marvellous undergrowths are veined with gleams; and, like light bubbles, a thousand bees quiver along the arbours over the silver grapes. The air is so lovely that it seems rainbow-hued; beneath the deep and radiant noons, it stirs as if it were roses of light; while, in the distance, the customary roads, like slow movements stretching their vermilion to the pearly horizon, climb towards the sun. Indeed, the diamonded gown of this fine summer clothes no other garden with so pure a brightness. And the unique joy sprung up in our two hearts discovers its own life in these clusters of flames. XIX May your bright eyes, your eyes of summer, be for me here on earth the images of goodness. Let our enkindled souls clothe with gold each flame of our thoughts. May my two hands against your heart be for you here on earth the emblems of gentleness. Let us live like two frenzied prayers straining at all hours one towards the other. May our kisses on our enraptured mouths be for us here on earth the symbols of our life. XX Tell me, my simple and tranquil sweetheart, tell me how much an absence, even of a day, saddens and stirs up love, and reawakens it in all its sleeping scalds? I go to meet those who are returning from the wondrous distances to which at dawn you went; I sit beneath a tree at a bend of the path, and, on the road, watching their coming, I gaze and gaze earnestly at their eyes still bright with having seen you. And I would kiss their fingers that have touched you, and cry out to them words they would not understand; and I listen a long while to the rhythm of their steps towards the shadow where the old evenings hold night prone. XXI During those hours wherein we are lost so far from all that is not ourselves, what lustral blood or what baptism bathes our hearts that strain towards all love? Clasping our hands without praying, stretching out our arms without crying aloud, but with earnest and ingenuous mind worshipping something farther off and purer than ourselves, we know not what, how we blend with, how we live our lives in, the unknown. How overwhelmed we are in the presence of those hours of supreme existence; how the soul desires heavens in which to seek for new gods. Oh! the torturing and wondrous joy and the daring hope of being one day, across death itself, the prey of these silent terrors. XXII Oh! this happiness, sometimes so rare and frail that it frightens us! In vain we hush our voices, and make of all your hair a tent to shelter us; often the anguish in our hearts flows over. But our love, being like a kneeling angel, begs and supplicates that the future give to others than ourselves a like affection and life, so that their fate may not be envious of ours. And, too, on evil days, when the great evenings extend to heaven the bounds of despair, we ask forgiveness of the night that kindles with the gentleness of our heart. XXIII Let us, in our love and ardour, let us live so boldly our finest thoughts that they interweave in harmony with the supreme ecstasy and perfect fervour. Because in our kindred souls something more holy than we and purer and greater awakens, let us clasp hands to worship it through ourselves. It matters not that we have only cries or tears to define it humbly, and that its charm is so rare and powerful that, in the enjoyment of it, our hearts are nigh to failing us. Even so, let us remain, and for ever, the mad devotees of this almost implacable love, and the kneeling worshippers of the sudden God who reigns in us, so violent and so ardently gentle that he hurts and overwhelms us. XXIV So soon as our lips touch, we feel so much more luminous together that it would seem as though two Gods loved and united in us. We feel our hearts to be so divinely fresh and so renewed by their virgin light that, in their brightness, the universe is made manifest to us. In our eyes, joy is the only ferment of the world that ripens and becomes fruitful innumerably on our roads here below; as in clusters spring up among the silken lakes on which sails travel the myriad blossoms of the stars above. Order dazzles us as fire embers, everything bathes us in its light and appears a torch to us: our simple words have a sense so lovely that we repeat them to hear them without end. We are the sublime conquerors who vanquish eternity without pride and without a thought of trifling time: and our love seems to us always to have been. XXV To prevent the escape of any part of us from our embrace that is so intense as to be holy, and to let love shine clear through the body itself, we go down together to the garden of the flesh. Your breasts are there like offerings and your two hands are stretched out to me; and nothing is of so much worth as the simple provender of words said and heard. The shadow of the white boughs travels over your neck and face, and your hair unloosens its bloom in garlands on the swards. The night is all of blue silver; the night is a lovely silent bed—gentle night whose breezes, one by one, will strip the great lilies erect in the moonlight. XXVI Although autumn this evening along the paths and the woods' edges lets the leaves fall slowly like gilded hands; Although autumn this evening with its arms of wind harvests the petals and their pallor of the earnest rose-trees; We shall let nothing of our two souls fall suddenly with these flowers. But before the flames of the golden hearth of memory, we will both crouch and warm our hands and knees. To guard against the sorrows hidden in the future, against time that makes an end of all ardour, against our terror and even against ourselves, we will both crouch near the hearth that our memory has lit up in us. And if autumn involves the woods, the lawns and the ponds in great banks of shadow and soaring storms, at least its pain shall not disturb the inner quiet garden where the equal footsteps of our thoughts walk together in the light. XXVII The gift of the body when the soul is given is but the accomplishment of two affections drawn headlong one towards the other. You are only happy in your body that is so lovely in its native freshness because in all fervour you may offer it to me wholly as a total alms. And I give myself to you knowing nothing except that I am greater by knowing you, who are ever better and perhaps purer since your gentle body offered its festival to mine. Love, oh! let it be for us the sole discernment and the sole reason of our heart, for us whose most frenzied happiness is to be frenzied in our trust. XXVIII Was there in us one fondness, one thought, one gladness, one promise that we had not sown before our footsteps? Was there a prayer heard in secret whose hands stretched out gently over our bosom we had not clasped? Was there one appeal, one purpose, one tranquil or violent desire whose pace we had not quickened? And each loving the other thus, our hearts went out as apostles to the gentle, timid and chilled hearts of others; And by the power of thought invited them to feel akin to ours, and, with frank ardours, to proclaim love, as a host of flowers loves the same branch that suspends and bathes it in the sun. And our soul, as though made greater in this awakening, began to celebrate all that loves, magnifying love for love's sake, and to cherish divinely, with a wild desire, the whole world that is summed up in us. XXIX The lovely garden blossoming with flames that seemed to us the double or the mirror of the bright garden we carried in our hearts is crystallized in frost and gold this evening. A great white silence has descended and sits yonder on the marble horizons, towards which march the trees in files, with their blue, immense and regular shadow beside them. No puff of wind, no breath. Alone, the great veils of cold spread from plain to plain over the silver marshes or crossing roads. The stars appear to live. The hoar-frost shines like steel through the translucent, frozen air. Bright powdered metals seem to snow down, in the infinite distances, from the pallor of a copper moon. Everything sparkles in the stillness. And it is the divine hour when the mind is haunted by the thousand glances that are cast upon earth by kind and pure and unchangeable eternity towards the hazards of human wretchedness. XXX If it should ever happen that, without our knowledge, we became a pain or torment or despair one to the other; If it should come about that weariness or hackneyed pleasure unbent in us the golden bow of lofty desire; If the crystal of pure thought must fall in our hearts and break; If, in spite of all, I should feel myself vanquished because I had not bowed my will sufficiently to the divine immensity of goodness; Then, oh! then let us embrace like two sublime madmen who beneath the broken skies cling to the summits even so—and with one flight and soul ablaze grow greater in death. THE HOURS OF AFTERNOON I Step by step, day by day, age has come and placed his hands upon the bare forehead of our love, and has looked upon it with his dimmer eyes. And in the fair garden shrivelled by July, the flowers, the groves and the living leaves have let fall something of their fervid strength on to the pale pond and the gentle paths. Here and there, the sun, harsh and envious, marks a hard shadow around his light. And yet the hollyhocks still persist in their growth towards their final splendour, and the seasons weigh upon our life in vain; more than ever, all the roots of our two hearts plunge unsatiated into happiness, and clutch, and sink deeper. Oh! these hours of afternoon girt with roses that twine around time, and rest against his benumbed flanks with cheeks aflower and aflame! And nothing, nothing is better than to feel thus, still happy and serene, after how many years? But if our destiny had been quite different, and we had both been called upon to suffer— even then!—oh! I should have been happy to live and die, without complaining, in my stubborn love. II Roses of June, you the fairest with your hearts transfixed by the sun; violent and tranquil roses, like a delicate flock of birds settled on the branches; Roses of June and July, upright and new, mouths and kisses that suddenly move or grow still with the coming and going of the wind, caress of shadow and gold on the restless garden; Roses of mute ardour and gentle will, roses of voluptuousness in your mossy sheaths, you who spend the days of high summer loving each other in the brightness; Fresh, glowing, magnificent roses, all our roses, oh! that, like you, our manifold desires, in our dear weariness or trembling pleasure, might love and exalt each other and rest! III If other flowers adorn the house and the splendour of the countryside, the pure ponds shine still in the grass with the great eyes of water of their mobile face. Who can say from what far-off and unknown distances so many new birds have come with sun on their wings? In the garden, April has given way to July, and the blue tints to the great carnation tints; space is warm and the wind frail; a thousand insects glisten joyously in the air; and summer passes in her robe of diamonds and sparks. IV The darkness is lustral and the dawn iridescent. From the lofty branch whence a bird flies, the dew-drops fall. A lucid and frail purity adorns a morning so bright that prisms seem to gleam in the air. A spring babbles; a noise of wings is heard. Oh! how beautiful are your eyes at that first hour when our silver ponds shimmer in the light and reflect the day that is rising. Your forehead is radiant and your blood beats. Intense and wholesome life in all its divine strength enters your bosom so completely, like a driving happiness, that to contain its anguish and its fury, your hands suddenly take mine, and press them almost fearfully against your heart. V I bring you this evening, as an offering, my joy at having plunged my body into the silk and gold of the frank and joyous wind and the gorgeous sun; my feet are bright with having walked among the grasses; my hands sweet with having touched the heart of flowers; my eyes shining at having felt the tears suddenly well up and spring into them before the earth in festival and its eternal strength. Space has carried me away drunken and fervent and sobbing in its arms of moving brightness; and I have passed I know not where, far away in the distance, with pent-up cries set free by my footsteps. I bring you life and the beauty of the plains breathe them on me in a good, frank breath; the marjoram has caressed my fingers, and the air and its light and its perfumes are in my flesh. VI Let us both sit down on the old worm-eaten bench near the path; and let my hand remain a long while within your two steadfast hands. With my hand that remains a long while given up to the sweet consciousness of being on your knees, my heart also, my earnest, gentle heart, seems to rest between your two kind hands. And we share an intense joy and a deep love to feel that we are so happy together, without one over-strong word to come trembling to our lips, or one kiss even to go burning towards your brow. And we would prolong the ardour of this silence and the stillness of our mute desires, were it not that suddenly, feeling them quiver, I clasp tightly, without willing it, your thinking hands; Your hands in which my whole happiness is hidden, and which would never, for anything in the world, deal violently with those deep things we live by, although in duty we do not speak of them. VII Gently, more gently still, cradle my head in your arms, my fevered brow and my weary eyes; Gently, more gently still, kiss my lips, and say to me those words that are sweeter at each dawn when your voice repeats them, and you have surrendered, and I love you still. The day rises sullen and heavy; the night was crossed by monstrous dreams; the rain and its long hair whip our casement, and the horizon is black with clouds of grief. Gently, more gently still, cradle my head in your arms, my fevered brow and my weary eyes; you are my hopeful dawn, with its caress in your hands and its light in your sweet words; See, I am re-born, without pain or shock, to the daily labour that traces its mark on my road, and instils into my life the will to be a weapon of strength and beauty in the golden grasp of an honoured life. VIII In the house chosen by our love as its birth-place, with its cherished furniture peopling the shadows and the nooks, where we live together, having as sole witnesses the roses that watch us through the windows, Certain days stand out of so great a consolation, certain hours of summer so lovely in their silence, that sometimes I stop time that swings with its golden disc in the oaken clock. Then the hour, the day, the night is so much ours that the happiness that hovers lightly over us hears nothing but the throbbing of your heart and mine that are brought close together by a sudden embrace. IX The pleasant task with the window open and the shadow of the green leaves and the passage of the sun on the ruddy paper, maintains the gentle violence of its silence in our good and pensive house. And the flowers bend nimbly and the large fruits shine from branch to branch, and the blackbirds, the bullfinches and the chaffinches sing and sing, so that my verses may burst forth clear and fresh, pure and true, like their songs, their golden flesh and their scarlet petals. And I see you pass in the garden, sometimes mingled with the sun and shadow; but your head does not turn, so that the hour in which I work jealousy at these frank and gentle poems may not be disturbed. X In the depth of our love dwells all faith; we bind up a glowing thought together with the least things: the awakening of a bud, the decline of a rose, the flight of a frail and beautiful bird that, by turns, appears or disappears in the shadow or the light. A nest falling to pieces on the mossy edge of a roof and ravaged by the wind fills the mind with dread. An insect eating the heart of the hollyhocks terrifies: all is fear, all is hope. Though reason with its sharp and soothing snow may suddenly cool these charming pangs, what matters! Let us accept them without inquiring overmuch into the false, the true, the evil or the good they portend; Let us be happy that we can be as children, believing in their fatal or triumphant power, and let us guard with closed shutters against too sensible people. XI Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars; that which the night conceals or shows between its veils is mingled with the fervour of our exalted being. Those who live with love live with eternity. It matters not that their reason approve or scoff, and, upright on its high walls, hold out to them, along the quays and harbours, its bright torches; they are the travellers from beyond the sea. Far off, farther than the ocean and its black floods, they watch the day break from shore to shore; fixed certainty and trembling hope present the same front to their ardent gaze. Happy and serene, they believe eagerly; their soul is the deep and sudden brightness with which they burn the summit of the loftiest problems; and to know the world, they but scrutinize themselves. They follow distant roads chosen by themselves, living with the truths enclosed within their simple, naked eyes, that are deep and gentle as the dawn; and for them alone there is still song in paradise. XII This is the holy hour when the lamp is lit: everything is calm and comforting this evening; and the silence is such that you could hear the falling of feathers. This is the holy hour when gently the beloved comes, like the breeze or smoke, most gently, most slowly. At first, she says nothing—and I listen; and I catch a glimpse of her soul, that I hear wholly, shining and bursting forth; and I kiss her on the eyes. This is the holy hour when the lamp is lit, when the acknowledgment of mutual love the whole day long is brought forth from the depths of our deep but transparent heart. And we each tell the other of the simplest things: the fruit gathered in the garden, the flower that has opened between the green mosses; and the thought that has sprung from some sudden emotion at the memory of a faded word of affection found at the bottom of an old drawer on a letter of yesteryear. XIII The dead kisses of departed years have put their seal on your face, and, beneath the melancholy and furrowing wind of age, many of the roses in your features have faded. I see your mouth and your great eyes glow no more like a morning of festival, nor your head slowly recline in the black and massive garden of your hair. Your dear hands, that remain so gentle, approach no more as in former years with light at their finger-tips to caress my forehead, as dawn the mosses. Your young and lovely body that I adorned with my thoughts has no longer the pure freshness of dew, and your arms are no longer like the bright branches. Alas! everything falls and fades ceaselessly; everything has changed, even your voice; your body has collapsed like a pavise, and let fall the victories of youth. But nevertheless my steadfast and earnest heart says to you: what are to me the years made heavier day by day, since I know that nothing in the world will disturb our exalted life, and that our soul is too profound for love still to depend on beauty? XIV For fifteen years our thoughts have run together, and our fine and serene ardour has vanquished habit, the dull-voiced shrew whose slow, rough hands wear out the most stubborn and the strongest love. I look at you and I discover you each day, so intimate is your gentleness or your pride: time indeed obscures the eyes of your beauty, but it exalts your heart, whose golden depths peep open. Artlessly, you allow yourself to be probed and known, and your soul always appears fresh and new; with gleaming masts, like an eager caravel, our happiness covers the seas of our desires. It is in us alone that we anchor our faith, to naked sincerity and simple goodness; we move and live in the brightness of a joyous and translucent trust. Your strength is to be infinitely pure and frail; to cross with burning heart all dark roads, and to have preserved, in spite of mist or darkness, all the rays of the dawn in your childlike soul. XV I thought our joy benumbed for ever, like a sun faded before it was night, on the day that illness with its leaden arms dragged me heavily towards its chair of weariness. The flowers and the garden were fear or deception to me; my eyes suffered to see the white noons flaming, and my two hands, my hands, seemed, before their time, too tired to hold captive our trembling happiness. My desires had become no more than evil weeds; they bit at each other like thistles in the wind; I felt my heart to be at once ice and burning coal and of a sudden dried up and stubborn in forgiveness. But you said the word that gently comforts, seeking it nowhere else than in your immense love; and I lived with the fire of your word, and at night warmed myself at it until the dawn of day. The diminished man I felt myself to be, both to myself and all others, did not exist for you; you gathered flowers for me from the window-sill, and, with your faith, I believed in health. And you brought to me, in the folds of your gown, the keen air, the wind of the fields and forests, and the perfumes of evening or the scents of dawn, and, in your fresh and deep-felt kisses, the sun. XVI Everything that lives about us in the fragile and gentle light, frail grasses, tender branches, hollyhocks, and the shadow that brushes them lightly by, and the wind that knots them, and the singing and hopping birds that swarm riotously in the sun like clusters of jewels,— everything that lives in the fine ruddy garden loves us artlessly, and we—we love everything. We worship the lilies we see growing; and the tall sunflowers, brighter than the Nadir— circles surrounded by petals of flames—burn our souls through their glow. The simplest flowers, the phlox and the lilac, grow along the walls among the feverfew, to be nearer to our footsteps; and the involuntary weeds in the turf over which we have passed open their eyes wet with dew. And we live thus with the flowers and the grass, simple and pure, glowing and exalted, lost in our love, like the sheaves in the gold of the corn, and proudly allowing the imperious summer to pierce our bodies, our hearts and our two wills with its full brightness. XVII Because you came one day so simply along the paths of devotion and took my life into your beneficent hands, I love and praise and thank you with my senses, with my heart and brain, with my whole being stretched like a torch towards your unquenchable goodness and charity. Since that day, I know what love, pure and bright as the dew, falls from you on to my calmed soul. I feel myself yours by all the burning ties that attach flames to their fire; all my body, all my soul mounts towards you with tireless ardour; I never cease to brood on your deep earnestness and your charm, so much so that suddenly I feel my eyes fill deliciously with unforgettable tears. And I make towards you, happy and calm, with the proud desire to be for ever the most steadfast of joys to you. All our affection flames about us; every echo of my being responds to your call; the hour is unique and sanctified with ecstasy, and my fingers are tremulous at the mere touching of your forehead, as though they brushed the wing of your thoughts. XVIII On days of fresh and tranquil health, when life is as fine as a conquest, the pleasant task sits down by my side like an honoured friend. He comes from gentle, radiant countries, with words brighter than the dews, in which to set, illuminating them, our feelings and our thoughts. He seizes our being in a mad whirlwind; he lifts up the mind on giant pilasters; he pours into it the fire that makes the stars live; he brings the gift of being God suddenly. And fevered transports and deep terrors— all serves his tragic will to make young again the blood of beauty in the veins of the world. I am at his mercy like a glowing prey. Therefore, when I return, though wearied and heavy, to the repose of your love, with the fires of my vast and supreme idea, it seems to me—oh! but for a moment—that I am bringing to you in my panting heart the heart-beat of the universe itself. XIX Out of the groves of sleep I came, somewhat morose because I had left you beneath their branches and their braided shadows, far from the glad morning sun. Already the phlox and the hollyhocks glisten, and I wander in the garden dreaming of verses clear as crystal and silver that would ring in the light. Then abruptly I return to you with so great a fervour and emotion that it seems to me as though my thought suddenly has already crossed from afar the leafy and heavy darkness of sleep to call forth your joy and your awakening. And when I join you once more in our warm house that is still possessed by darkness and silence, my clear, frank kisses ring like a dawn-song in the valleys of your flesh. XX Alas! when the lead of illness flowed in my benumbed veins with my heavy, sluggish blood, with my blood day by day heavier and more sluggish; When my eyes, my poor eyes, followed peevishly on my long, pale hands the fatal marks of insidious malady; When my skin dried up like bark, and I had no longer even strength enough to press my fiery lips against your heart, and there kiss our happiness; When sad and identical days morosely gnawed my life, I might never have found the will and the strength to hold out stoically, Had you not, each hour of the so long weeks, poured into my daily body with your patient, gentle, placid hands the secret heroism that flowed in yours. XXI Our bright garden is health itself. It is squandered in its brightness from the thousand hands of the branches and leaves as they wave to and fro. And the pleasant shade that welcomes our feet after the long roads pours into our tired limbs a quickening strength, gentle as the garden's mosses. When the pond plays with the wind and the sun, a ruddy heart seems to dwell in the depths of the water, and to beat, ardent and young, with the ripples; and the tall, straight gladioli and the glowing roses that move in their splendour hold out their golden goblets of red blood at the end of their living stalks. Our bright garden is health itself. XXII It was June in the garden, our hour and our day, and our eyes looked upon all things with so great a love that the roses seemed to us to open gently, and to see and love us. The sky was purer than it had ever been: the insects and birds floated in the gold and gladness of an air as frail as silk, and our kisses were so exquisite that they gave an added beauty to the sunshine and the birds. It was as though our happiness had suddenly become azure, and required the whole sky wherein to shine; through gentle openings, all life entered our being, to expand it. And we were nothing but invocatory cries, and wild raptures, and vows and entreaties, and the need, suddenly, to recreate the gods, in order to believe.