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Gautier Théophile
Enamels and Cameos and other Poems
THE WORLD'S MALICIOUS
Ah, little one, the world's malicious!
With mocking smiles thy beauty greeting.
It says that in thy breast capricious
A watch, and not a heart, is beating.
Yet like the sea thy breast is swelling
With all the wild, tumultuous power
A tide of blood sends pulsing, welling,
Beneath thy flesh in life's young hour.
Ah, little one, the world is spiteful!
It says thy vivid eyes are fooling,
And that they have their charm delightful
From faithful, diplomatic schooling.
Yet on thy lashes' shifting curtain
An iridescent tear-drop trembles,
Like dew unbidden and uncertain,
That no well-water's gleam resembles.
Ah, little one, the world reviles thee!
It says thou hast no spirit's favour,
That verse, which seemingly beguiles thee,
Hath unto thee a Sanskrit savour.
Yet to thy crimson lips inviting,
Intelligence's bee of laughter,
At every flash of wit alighting,
Allures and gleams, and lingers after.
Ah, little one, I know the trouble!
Thou lovest me. The world, it guesses.
Leave me, and hear its praises bubble: —
"What heart, what spirit, she possesses!"
INES DE LAS SIERRAS
TO PETRA CAMARA
In Spain, as Nodier's pen has told,
Three officers in night's mid hours
Came on a castle dark and old,
With sunken eaves and mouldering towers,
A true Anne Radcliffe type it was,
With ruined halls and crumbling rooms
And windows graven by the claws
Of Goya's bats that ranged the glooms.
Now while they feasted, gazed upon
By ancient portraits standing guard
In their ancestral frames, anon
A sudden cry rang thitherward.
Forth from a distant corridor
That many a moonbeam's pallid hue
Fretted fantastically o'er,
A wondrous phantom sped in view.
With bodice high and hair comb-tipped,
A woman, running, dancing, hied.
Adown the dappled gloom she dipped, —
An iridescent form descried.
A languid, dead, voluptuous mood
Filled every act's abandon brief,
Till at the door she stopped, and stood
Sinister, lovely past belief.
Her raiment crumpled in the tomb
Showed here and there a spangle's foil.
At every start a faded bloom
Dropped petals in her hair's black coil.
A dull scar crossed her bloodless throat,
As of a knife. Like rattle chill
Of teeth, her castanets she smote
Full in their faces awed and still.
Ah, poor bacchante, sad of grace!
So wild the sweetness of her spell,
The curvèd lips in her white face
Had lured a saint from heaven to hell!
Like darkling birds her eyelashes
Upon her cheek lay fluttering light.
Her kirtle's swinging cadences
Displayed her limbs of lustrous white.
She bowed amid a mist of gyres,
And with her hand, as dancers may,
Like flowers she gathered up desires,
And grouped them in a bright bouquet.
Was it a wraith or woman seen,
A thing of dreams, or blood and flesh,
The flame that burst from out the sheen
Of beauty's undulating mesh?
It was a phantom of the past,
It was the Spain of olden keep,
Who, at the sound of cheer at last,
Upbounded from her icy sleep,
In one bolero mad, supreme,
Rough-resurrected, powerful,
Showing beneath her kirtle's gleam
The ribbon wrested from the bull.
About her throat the scar of red
The deathblow was, dealt silently
Unto a generation dead
By every new-born century.
I saw this self-same phantom fleet,
All Paris ringing with her praise,
When soft, diaphanous, mystic, sweet,
La Petra Camara held its gaze, —
Closing her eyes with languor rare,
Impassive, passionate of art,
And, like the murdered Ines fair,
Dancing, a dagger in her heart.
ODELET
AFTER ANACREON
Poet of her face divine,
Curb this over-zeal of thine!
Doves wing frighted from the ground
At a step's too sudden sound,
And her passion is a dove,
Frighted by too bold a love.
Mute as marble Hermes wait
By the blooming hawthorn-gate.
Thou shalt see her wings expand,
She shall flutter to thy hand.
On thy forehead thou shalt know
Something like a breath of snow,
Or of pinions pure that beat
In a whirl of whiteness sweet.
And the dove, grown venturesome,
Shall upon thy shoulder come,
And its rosy beak shall sip
From the nectar of thy lip.
SMOKE
Beneath yon tree sits humble
A squalid, hunchbacked house,
With roof precipitous,
And mossy walls that crumble.
Bolted and barred the shanty.
But from its must and mould,
Like breath of lips in cold,
Comes respiration scanty.
A vapour upward welling,
A slender, silver streak,
To God bears tidings meek
Of the soul in the little dwelling.
APOLLONIA
Fair Apollonia, name august,
Greek echo of the sacred vale,
Great name whose harmonies robust
Thee as Apollo's sister hail!
Struck with the plectrum on the lyre,
And in melodious beauty sung,
Brighter than love's and glory's fire,
It resonant rings upon the tongue.
At such a classic sound as this,
The elves plunge down their German lake.
Alone the Delphian worthy is
So lustreful a name to take, —
Pythia! when in her flowing dress
She mounts her place with feet unshod,
And, priestess white and prophetess,
Wistful awaits the tardy god.
THE BLIND MAN
A blind man walks without the gate,
Wild-staring as an owl by day,
Fumbling his flute betimes and late,
Along the way.
He pipeth, weary wretch and worn,
A roundel shrill and obsolete.
The spectre of a dog forlorn
Attends his feet.
For him the days go lustreless.
Invisible life with beat and roar
He heareth like a torrent press
Around, before.
What strange chimeras haunt his head
And on his mind's bedarkened space,
What characters unheard, unread,
Doth fancy trace?
Thus down Venetian leads of doom,
Wan prisoners ensepulchred
In palpable, undying gloom
Have graven their word.
And yet perchance when life's last spark
Death speeds unto eternal night,
The tomb-bred soul, within the dark,
Shall see the light.
SONG
In April earth is white and rose
Like youth and love, now tendering
Her smiles, now fearful to disclose
Her virgin heart unto the Spring.
In June, a little pale and worn,
And full at heart of vague desire,
She hideth in the yellow corn,
With sunburned Summer to respire.
In August, wild Bacchante, she
Her bosom bares to Autumn shapes,
And on the tiger-skin flung free,
Draws forth the purple blood of grapes.
And in December, shrivelled, old,
Bepowdered white from foot to head,
In dream she wakens Winter cold,
That sleeps beside her in her bed.
WINTER FANTASIES
I
Red of nose and white of face,
Bent his desk of ice before,
Winter doth his theme retrace
In the season's quatuor, —
Beating measure and the ground
With a frozen foot for us,
Singing with uncertain sound
Olden tunes and tremulous.
And as Haendel's wig sublime
Trembling shook its powder, oft
Flutter as he taps his time
Snow-flakes in a flurry soft.
II
In the Tuileries fount the swan
Meets the ice, and all the trees,
As in land of fairies wan,
Arc bedecked with filigrees.
Flowers of frost in vases low
Stand unquickened and unstirred,
And we trace upon the snow
Starred footsteps of a bird.
Where with lightest raiment spanned,
Venus was with Phocion met,
Now has Winter's hoary hand
Clodion's "Chilly Maiden" set.
III
Women pass in ermine dress,
Sable, too, and miniver,
And the shivering goddesses
Haste to don the fashion's fur.
Venus of the Brine comes forth,
In her hooded mantle's fluff.
Flora, blown by breezes North,
Hides her fingers in her muff.
And the shepherdesses round
Of Coustou and Coysevox,
Finding scarves too light have wound
Furs about their throats of snow.
IV
Heavy doth the North bedrape
Paris mode from foot to top,
As o'er fair Athenian shape
Scythian should a bearskin drop.
Over winter's garments meet,
Everywhere we see the fur,
Flung with Russian pomp, and sweet
With the fragrant vetiver.
Pleasure's laughing glances feast
Far amid the statues, where
From the bristles of a beast
Bursts a Venus torso fair!
If you venture hitherward,
With a tender veil to cheat
Glances over-daring, guard
Well your Andalusian feet!
Snow shall fashion like a frame
On your foot's impression rare,
Signing with each step your name
On the carpet soft and vair.
Thus were surly master led
To the hidden trysting-place,
Where his Psyche, faintly red,
Were beheld in Love's embrace.
THE BROOK
Near a great water's waste
A brook mid rock and spar
Came bubbling up in haste,
As though to travel far.
It sang: "What joy to rise!
'T was dismal under ground.
I mirror now the skies.
My banks with green abound.
"Forget-me-nots – how fair!
Beseech me from the grass;
Wings frolic in the air,
And graze me as they pass.
"I yet shall be – who knows? —
A river winding down,
And greeting as it flows
Valley and cliff and town.
"I'll broider with my spray
Stone bridge and granite quay,
And bear great ships away
Unto the long wide sea."
So planned it, babbling by,
As water boiling fast
Within a basin high,
To top its brim at last.
Cradle by tomb is crossed.
Giants are early dead.
Scarce born, the brook was lost
Within a lake's deep bed.
TOMBS AND FUNERAL PYRES
No grim cadaver set its flaw
In happy days of pagan art,
And man, content with what he saw,
Stripped not the veil from beauty's heart.
No form once loved that buried lay,
A hideous spectre to appal,
Dropped bit by bit its flesh away,
As one by one our garments fall;
Or, when the days had drifted by
And sundered shrank the vaulted stones,
Showed naked to the daring eye
A motley heap of rattling bones.
But, rescued from the funeral pyre,
Life's ashen, light residuum
Lay soft, and, spent the cleansing fire,
The urn held sweet the body's sum, —
The sum of all that earth may claim
Of the soul's butterfly, soul passed, —
All that is left of spended flame
Upon the tripod at the last.
Between acanthus leaves and flowers
In the white marble gaily went
Loves and bacchantes all the hours,
Dancing about the monument.
At most, a little Genius wild
Trampled a flame out in the gloom,
And art's harmonious flowering smiled
Upon the sadness of the tomb.
The tomb was then a pleasant place.
As bed of child that slumbereth,
With many a fair and laughing grace
The joy of life surrounded death.
Then death concealed its visage gaunt,
Whose sockets deep, and sunken nose,
And railing mouth our spirits haunt,
Past any dream that horror shows.
The monster in flesh raiment clad
Hid deep its spectral form uncouth,
And virgin glances, beauty-glad,
Sped frankly to the naked youth.
Twas only at Trimalchio's board
A little skeleton made sign,
An ivory plaything unabhorred,
To bid the feasters to the wine.
Gods, whom Art ever must avow,
Ruled the marmoreal sky's demesne.
Olympus yields to Calvary, now;
Jupiter to the Nazarene!
Voices are calling, "Pan is dead!"
Dusk deepeneth within, without.
On the black sheet of sorrow spread,
The whitened skeleton gleams out.
It glideth to the headstone bare,
And signs it with a paraph wild,
And hangs a wreath of bones to glare
Upon the charnel death-defiled.
It lifts the coffin-lid and quaffs
The musty air, and peers within,
Displays a ring of ribs, and laughs
Forever with its awful grin.
It urges unto Death's fleet dance
The Emperor, the Pope, the King,
And makes the pallid steed to prance,
And low the doughty warrior fling; —
Behind the courtesan steals up,
And makes wry faces in her glass;
Drinks from the sick man's trembling cup;
Delves in the miser's golden mass.
Above the team it whirls the thong,
With bone for goad to hurry it,
Follows the plowman's way along,
And guides the furrows to a pit.
It comes, the uninvited guest,
And lurks beneath the banquet chair,
Unseen from the pale bride to wrest
Her little silken garter fair.
The number swells: the young give hand
Unto the old, and none may flee.
The irresistible saraband
Compelleth all humanity.
Forth speeds the tall, ungainly fright,
Playing the rebeck, dancing mad,
Against the dark a frame of white,
As Holbein drew it – horror-sad; —
Or if the times be frivolous,
Trusses the shroud about its hips:
Then like a Cupid mischievous,
Across the ballet-room it skips,
And unto carven tombs it flies,
Where marchionesses rest demure,
Weary of love, in exquisite guise,
In chapels dim and pompadour.
But hide thy hideous form at last,
Worm-eaten actor! Long enough
In death's wan melodrama cast,
Thou'st played thy part without rebuff.
Come back, come back, O ancient Art!
And cover with thy marble's gleam
This Gothic skeleton! Each part
Consume, ye flames of fire supreme!
If man be then a creature made
In God's own image, to aspire,
When shattered must the image fade,
Let the lone fragments feed the fire!
Immortal form! Rise thou in flame
Again to beauty's fount of bloom
Let not thy clay endure the shame,
The degradation of the tomb!
