9: ‘The Poem Weeps its Lament’

The poem weeps its lament; drama suffers
Twenty actors pour out their souls in gushes;
And the crowd, leaning forward, is much moved by it,
Until they resume: — “Bah! author’s a man of wit,
He’s hurling false thunderbolts at falser heroes,
And laughs to see us mourn their fanciful woes.
Wife, calm yourself now! Sister, dry your eyes” —
The mob’s wrong: mind is heart; to philosophize
Is to suffer from thought, to be eaten by fire.
The poet has bled blood that flows through theatre;
These beings he creates bind him in a scrum;
He shakes in them, lives them, and he dies in them;
Within his creation the poet grows shuddery;
He is her; she is him; he works his work shadowy,
He weeps, he rips out his own viscera, dumps it—
His drama, sole sculptor—upon his dark summit,
Kneads his own flesh, sacred clay; he self-mates
Is reborn endlessly, the dreamer who creates
Othello from a tear, Alceste from a sob, lonesome
Though he is with them, pell-mell, work blossoms.
In his immense and true genesis, one and diverse,
He, suffering eternal pain, pours out his rivers,
Without exhausting his side from which light shines.
What makes him a god is his truth to greater mankind.
He is genius, being, more than others, un homme.
Corneille is in Rouen but his soul is in Rome;
His brow, like old Catos, bears masculine tiredness.
How pale is Shakespeare! Before Hamlet, attired is
He whom the ghost awaits on the harsh stage front,
While an enormous moon rises on the horizon.
From Argan’s bad dream, Poquelin’s superficies;
He laughs: yes, he gasps! With wandering Ulysses,
Homer, distraught, rushes into sea mist.
Saint John is a-tremble; in his deep-dark breast
The horrible Apocalypse sounds its alarum.
Aeschylus! Orestes stomps, shouts in your bosom,
And, black bard, it’s where you sharp breath is exhaled,
Upon your giant skull that Prometheus is nailed.

Paris, January 1834.