May Night

Muse

Poet, take up your lute and give me a kiss;

The wild rose scent bursts from its flowering bud

Spring is born tonight; the ardent winds will blow:

And the wagtail, whilst waiting for dawn,

Is perched in bushes turned freshly to green.

Poet, take up your lute and give me a kiss;

Poet

How dark it is in the valley!

I thought that a shapeless form

Floated there over the forest.

It came from the field

Its foot grazing the flowering grass;

What a strange vision is this

That fades and disappears!

Muse

Poet, take up your lute; night upon the lawn

Rocks the zephyr in its odorous wings.

The still virginal rose chastely withdraws

From the pearly winged hornet drunkenly dying.

Listen! All is quiet; dream of your belovèd.

This evening, beneath the foliaged limes,

The rays of the setting sun bid a sweeter farewell.

This evening, all will flower. Immortal nature

Is filled with perfume, love and whispers

Like the joyful bed of the newly married.

Poet

Why does my heart beat so quickly?

What agitation is this that I feel

And fills me with dread?

Does somebody knock at my door?

Why is my half-dead lamp

Dazzling me with its light?

Great God! My whole body is trembling

Who comes? Who calls? - Nobody.

I am alone; it is the hour that strikes;

O solitude! O poverty!

Muse

Poet, take up your lute; the wine of youth

Ferments tonight in the veins of God.

My breast is disturbed oppressed by sensual delight;

And the changing winds have set my lips on fire.

O indolent child, look at my beauty

Our first kiss, do you not remember,

When I saw you so pale at the touch of my wing

And, with tearful eyes, you fell into my arms?

Ah! How I consoled you in your bitter affliction!

Alas! Still in your youth, you would die of love.

Now, console me tonight, I am dying of hope;

I am in need of prayer to live until day.

Poet

Is it you whose voice is calling?

O my poor muse, is it you?

O my flower! O my immortal!

Here, alone, pure and faithful

Where, still, your love for me may live!

Yes, I see you. It is you my fairest!

It is you my mistress and sister!

And I feel in deepest night

That your golden robe floods me about

With rays gliding into my heart.

Muse

Poet, take up your lute, it is I, your immortal,

Who has seen you tonight so sad and silent;

And who, like a bird that calls to its clutch,

Descends from the heights of the skies to weep with you.

Come. You are suffering, my friend. Some solitary grief

Gnaws at your life. Something groans in your heart;

Some love, such as one sees on earth, has come,

A shadow of gladness, a semblance of pleasure.

Come! Let us sing before God; let us sing your thoughts

In your pleasures lost, in your pains of the past.

Let us depart in a kiss for a world unknown.

Let us waken at random your echoes of life,

Let us speak of pleasure, glory and folly

Be it a dream and the first that comes.

Let us conjure a place where one may forget;

Let us depart, we are alone and the universe ours.

There is the green of Scotland, and Italian brown

And Greece, my mother, where the honey is sweet;

Argos and Pteleon, the place of tombs,

And Messa divine fancied by doves;

And the changing face of Pelions brow

And the blue Titarese and the gulf of silver

That displays in its waters, where the swan is mirrored,

White Oloossone to white Camyre.

Tell me what golden dream cradles our songs.

From where come the tears that we pour?

This morning, when the day first struck your eye,

What thoughtful seraph, bent over your bedside,

Shook lilacs into your softened dress

And quietly whispered the loves that he dreamed?

Shall we sing of hope, sadness or joy?

Shall we soak in the blood of steel clad battalions?

Shall we suspend the lover on a silken ladder?

Shall we throw to the winds the foam of our galloping steed?

Shall we tell what hand in lamps without number

Lights, night and day, the celestial mansion

With holy oil of life and undying love?

Shall we shout to Tarquin " It is time. Look! It is dark "

Or dive for pearls in the depths of the sea?

Shall we lead the goat to the bitter ebony trees?

Shall we display the sky to melancholy?

Or follow the hunter through steep sloping hills

Where the doe looks upon him, tearfully pleading,

The heathland awaits her; her young newly born;

He stoops to the slaughter, he throws to the pack

Of baying dogs the still beating heart.

Shall we paint a young maiden with purpled cheek

Going to mass with her page following after

And with a worried look at the side of her mother

With parted lips forgetting her prayers?

She listens atremble by the echoing pillar

That resounds to the spurs of a bold cavalier.

Shall we tell of the heroes in the old days of France

Scaling, fully armed, battlemented towers

And revive the tales of romance

Forgotten glories of which inspired the minstrels?

Shall we clothe an elegy in tender white?

Or bid the man of Waterloo to tell his life

And how he broke his human herd

Before the herald of endless night sent him,

With a blow of his wing, to his mound of green,

His two arms crossed on his heart of iron?

Shall we nail a haughty satire to a post

The name sold seven times over by a pale pamphleteer

Who, pressed by hunger, from his depths obscure,

Comes, quivering with impotence and envy,

To insult the hope on the brow of genius

And gnaw the laurel that his breath has soiled?

Take up your lute. Take up your lute. I can no longer be silent.

My wing lifts me upon the sweet breath of spring.

The wind will bear me aloft and I shall be leaving the earth.

But you weep! God has heard; the hour is nigh.

Poet

If only this you ask, dear sister mine:

A kiss from a friendly lip;

And a tear from my eye,

Gladly, shall I give them to you

As a remembrance of love;

But, if you soar again into the skies,

I shall sing neither of hope

Nor of glory, nor of gladness;

Alas, not even of suffering.

My mouth now keeps its silence

To hear the speech of my heart.

Muse

Do you think that the autumn wind is my guide

That feeds on tears even unto the tomb

And for whom grief is but a drop of water?

O poet! A kiss! It is I who gives it;

The weed that must be rooted out from this place

Is your indolent self. Your grief is that of God.

Whatever it be that your youth endures,

Seek your relief from this holy wound

Placed by dark spirits into the depths of your heart;

Nothing makes us greater than a noble grief.

But, for a being subjected so, O poet, be not persuaded

That, here below, dumb may be your voice.

The most desperate songs yield the greatest beauty

And I know of immortal ones that are the purest sobs.

When, in the evening mists, the pelican returns

From his travels abroad to his nest of reeds,

His famished young run over the shore

On seeing him swoop, far away, over the waters.

Already thinking to seize and to share the prey,

They run to their parent with cries of joy

Shaking their beaks on hideous necks.

Slowly, now, he gains a perch on a rock

Sheltering his young with his wing held wide,

A melancholy fisher gazing up to the sky.

In long streaks from his opened breast flows his blood;

In vain has he searched the depths of the sea;

The ocean empty, the shoreland bare;

For nourishment, he has brought his heart.

Sombrely and silently, stretched upon the rock,

He shares a father's organs with his sons

In a love sublime, he cradles all his grief;

He sees the blood run down upon his breast

And in his feast of death, sags and staggers

Drunk with voluptuous tenderness and horror.

But, then, amid this sacrifice divine,

Fatigued by dying in such a protracted agony,

He fears that his offspring may not let him live;

Thus, he rouses, opens his wing to the wind

And, beating his heart with a wild cry,

Thrusts into the night such a funereal farewell

That the birds of the sea desert their shore

And the traveller, lingering on the beach,

Feels death passing by and commends himself to God.

Poet! Thus it is with all great poets.

In their leaving, generous to those who live the while;

But the banquets that they serve at their feasts

Mostly resemble those of the pelican.

When, thus, they speak of hopes deceived

Of sadness, forgetfulness, love and misfortune,

It is not a concert to expand the heart.

Their oratory is that of swords

That trace a glittering circle in the air

From which there always hangs some drops of blood.

Poet

O muse, insatiable wraith,

Be not so bold in your demands.

Man writes nothing in sand

At times when whirlwinds blow.

I have known in former days

When youth was there upon my lips,

A time to sing like a fluttering bird;

But I have suffered a martyrdom severe

And the little that I could say,

If I were to play upon my lyre,

Would break it like a reed.