Sestine Enchainée
When autumn cloudlets fleck the sky
Straying southward like birds o’er the sea,
When the flickering sunlight on the dunes
Is pale, as seagrasses kissed by the spray,
Seagrasses that knew the summer of yesterday–
Sweet are the dreams on the breeze-blown strand!
Sweet are the dreams on the breeze-blown strand!
When cloud skiffs skim athwart the sky
And like a phantom of yesterday
The light house shimmers out to sea
Pale as the sand and the sea-worn spray
And the straggling sunlight on the dunes.
Like straggling sunlight on the dunes,
Like opal surges that wash the strand
With briny fragrance, adoom with the spray,
Like wander-birds that career the sky
To flowerlit isles of some Southern sea-
Such are the dreams of yesterday!
Alas, our dreams of yesterday,
Frail as the fragrance of the dunes,
Vain as dark jewels of the sea
Cast up on some glimmering strand,
They vanish like cloud sails on the sky,
Pale as seagrasses frowsed by the spray.
Pale as seagrasses kissed by the spray,
Is all this life of yesterday,
All our longings for clear blue skies
For the low cool plash on autumn dunes,
All our musings on tide-left strands
While birds wing southward o’er the sea.
Like birds winging southward o’er the sea
Scattered in air-like wasteful spray,
Sea-fancies fading on lonesome strands
Weary of storm drifts of yesterday,
Thus our thoughts on the sea-scooped dunes
When autumn cloudlets fleck the sky.
Oh, autumn-sea under a cloud-flecked sky
As caressed are thy dunes with opal spray
So shimmer in dreams on the breeze-blown strand
Sweet long-lost summers of yesterday.
to Maurice Maeterlinck
Weird phantoms rise in the dawn-winds blow,
In the land of shadows the dawn-flowers grow;
The night-worn moon yields her weary glow
To the morn-rays that over the dream-waste flow.
Oh, to know what the dawn-wind murmurs
In chapels of pines to the ashen moons;
What the forest-well whispers to dale and dell
With her singular, reticent runes;
To know the plaint of each falling leaf
As it whirls across the autumnal plain;
To know the dreams of the desolate shore
As sails, like ghosts, pass o’er the dawnlit main!
To know, oh, to know
Why all life’s strains have the same refrain
As of rain,
Beating sadly against the window pane.
We do not know and we can not know,
And all that is left for us here below
(Since “songs and singers are out of date”)
And the muses have met with a similar fate)
Is to flee to the land of shadows and dreams,
Where the dawn-flowers grow
And the dawn-winds blow,
As morn-rays over life’s dream-waste of flow
To drown the moon in their ambient glow.
Envoy
Oh, gray dawn-poet of Flanders,
Though in this life we ne’er may meet,
I’ll linger where thy dream-maids wander
To strew these dawn-flowers at their feet.
At night the Universe grows lean, sober-
faced, of intoxication,
The shadow of the half-sphere curtains
down closely against my world, like a
doorless cage, and the stillness chained by
wrinkled darkness strains throughout the Uni-
verse to be free.
Listen, frogs in the pond, (the world is a pond itself)
cry out for the light, for the truth!
The curtains rattle ghostlily along, bloodily biting
my soul, the winds knocking on my cabin door
with their shadowy hands.
The spring warmth steals into me, drying up all the tears of my soul,
And gives me a flight into the vastness,—into a floorless, unroofed reverie-hall.
Lo, such greenness, such velvety greenness, such a heaven without heaven above!
Lo, again, such grayness, such velvety grayness, such an earth without earth below!
My soul sails through the waveless mirror-seas.
Oh, how near to Fairyland!
Blow, blow, gust of wind!
Sweep away my soul-boat against that very shore!
The silence is broken: into the nature
My soul sails out,
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
To meet the flowers and birds.
When my heart returns in the solitude,
She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
Lying on Love’s ruin.
I am like a leaf
Hanging over hope and despair,
Which trembles and joins
The world’s imagination and ghost.
Like tiny drops of crystal rain,
In every life the moments fall,
To wear away with silent beat,
The shell of selfishness o’er all.
And every act, not one too small,
That leaps from out the heart’s pure glow,
Like ray of gold sends forth a light,
While moments into seasons flow.
Athwart the dome, Eternity,
To Iris grown resplendent, fly
Bright gleams from every noble deed,
Till colors with each other vie.
’Tis glimpses of this grand rainbow,
Where moments with good deeds unite,
That gladden many weary hearts,
Inspiring them to seek more Light.
translated from the Spanish by Roderick Gill
O faint remembrances of vanished days
That stole away on such a velvet wing
O’er meads and groves, o’er plains and mountain ways,
What grief and sorrow to my heart you bring!
Come back without the shadow of your care,
Come back in silence and without a moan,
As the birds cross the unregarding air
Till none may tell the whence or whither flown.
Come back amid the pallor of the moon
That silvers all the azure rifts at sea,
Or in the deadly mist that in a swoon
Engulfs afar the green palm’s royal tree.
Bring back the murmur of the doves that made
Their little nests so neighborly to mine;
The vibrant airs—the fragrances that played
Around the peaks that saw my cradle shine.
Sing in my ear the melodies of old,
So sweet and joyous to my inmost heart;
O faint remembrances two breasts should hold,
Two breasts that Destiny was loath to part!
What matter if a sigh steals through the dream
That shows the withered vine in flower again?—
So that remembrances in singing seem,
O tremulous lyre, to speak my endless pain!
The barnacle of crowds—
Like a tuck
On a finished skirt, unnoticed—
He collected his material
Covertly:
A ragpicker,
A scavenger of words.
And the gleanings
Of his hearing
He would costume
In his own words,
And parade before
A listener.
So that now,
Across the tea-cup,
He was telling
Of his research,
Of his study,
Of his deep thought-out
Conclusions.
And the lady,
Connoisseur of old thoughts
Bound in new gilt bindings,
Smiled approval
At the finding
Of another curio
To place
In her long gallery.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
E’en though the world doth hate at this hour;
Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high
That war cannot dim it with all its armed power.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
The world hath her surplus of hatred today;
She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh,
Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
And love each other so deep and so well,
That the world may grow steady and forward fly,
Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell.
Along the Eastern shore the low waves creep,
Making a ceaseless music on the sand,
A song that gulls and curlews understand,
The lullaby that sings the day to sleep.
A thousand miles afar, the grim pines keep
Unending watch upon a shoreless land,
Yet through their tops, swept by some wizard hand,
The sound of surf comes singing up the steep.
Sweet, thou canst hear the tidal litany;
I, mid the pines land-wearied, may but dream
Of the far shore; but though the distance seem
Between us fixed, impassable, to me
Cometh thy soul’s voice, chanting love’s old theme,
And mine doth answer, as the pines the sea.
1885
