Adam Roberts

13. On Horace

Peddlers of Old Greek and Latin! Pedants! Dogs!
Philistines! Teachers! I hate you, pedagogues!
In your solemn, infallible, dull confidence,
You deny the ideal, grace, and beauty at once!
For your texts, your laws, your rules: all mere fossils!
And, beneath an air of profundity, you are just tossers!
You claim to teach everything, yet you know nothing!
Your ways are wicked and mean! — My blood’s seething
At the mere thought of me as a dreamy ass,
A lanky sixteen-year-old in the rhetoric class,
I endured such boredom! Rage! Folly! — Head-blocks! —
Such cold punishments and such sudden shocks!
— Sunday in detention and “Horace: five hundred lines!” —
I’d gaze at the monster with his nails begrimed,
And stammer: “Sir…” — But no: “no excuses!
Twenty times: ‘Plancus’ and the ‘Epistle to the Pisos!’” —
Yet that very day—oh, sweet notional idea
That made me dream then of Armida and Haidée—
I had a tryst with the doorkeeper’s daughter.
Great God! To lose such a day! All gone for naught! I
Had meant—while speaking of love, of pure bliss!
Intoxicating her with sky and naturalness—
To take her, if the weather wasn’t too grim-grey,
To eat galette cakes up on Butte Saint-Gervais!
Happy dream! I saw it all, in my furious needing—
The holidays, lilacs, the suburbs, that Eden—
And I heard, amidst thyme and lilies-of-the-valley,
The swelling violins of Mother Saguet!

Oh, the anguish! Furious, I would climb to my room—
An icebox in December, a furnace in June—
And there, I would cry out:

———————————— Horace! Friend mine!
You who lived life calmly by reason’s shine,
And who, with your candid wisdom, would perch
Upon all things as a bird lights upon a branch—
Not weighing things down, or lingering, ask gods
For nothing but the time to sing your free joyful odes!
You walked, listening at evening beneath the arbours
Heard the stifled laughter of giddy young girls,
Heard soft whispers in the woods’ dark enclave;
And at times you wooed your beautiful slave,
Blond-haired Myrtale, who would flare up and rear
As the ocean carves out the gulfs of Calabria;
Or else you leaned upon the table, drinking straight a
Glass of wine you poured out of a Greek krater.
Pegasus breathed verses from his nostrils to you, clean;
You mused; you composed various odes to Barine,
To Maecenas, to Virgil, to your Tibur field friends,
To the antique wall by which Chloe wends,
Bearing a fine amphora upon her lovely head.
At night, when Phoebe turned into Hecate the Dread,
The thickets filled with visions for your sight;
You saw glimmers, shapes, darkness, and rays of light;
Cerberus—tail between legs—rubbing up spends time
With Bacchus, god of wine and father of the iamb;
Silenus, pensive, digesting, in a spelunk, Lasciviously darts into the shadows to get drunk
On the scanty-clad nymphs white nakedness,
The faun with goat-feet and tapered ears!
Horace, when—tipsy on a little Sabine wine-quaff—
You caught Glycera or Lycoris at her bath,
Who could have told you, O Flaccus!—when in Rome
You painted young knights racing the hippodrome,
Just as Molière painted those French marquises,
You were crafting beguiling, profound, fine verses
To serve—in this odious age of ours— As instruments of torture for horrible fellows,
Disheveled and ill-clad, who—dull pedants—devour
Your name with their teeth as an ape chews a flower!
Hideous scribblers who—their heads being clear—
Have never had girlfriend nor had an idea!

Then I’d add, fierce:
—————————— O dunces! You who dress-up
The angry gods of the ether in cassocks,
Put a nightcap on Diana, and grimly place at
The heads of sombre Olympians your three-cornered hats—
Eunuchs, tormentors, cretins—be accursed!
For you are the sluggishness, old, dark, the worst;
For you are the winter; for you are—O ninnies—
The bear roaming the woods for a tree full of bees,
The shadow, the lead, the death, tomb, the void!
No one sits upright beside your stance sigmoid;
And you petrify with your stone-foulness of breath
Each innocent, radiant, splendid youth;
And you draw near the dawn, O you brings of slumber!
To serene Pindar, filled with far epic thunder,
To Sophocles, Terence, Plautus, and ambrosia,
O traitors, you mingle ancient Hypocrisia,
Your darkness, your morals, yokes, exeats, rotas
And the stupor of grim, sanctimonious cloisters;
Your claw-marks that scar every most-sublime book,
Your prejudices making your eyes fog-cooked,
The dread of the future, the hatred of progress;
And—fearless, unrepentant and pitiless—
Of youth, virgin hearts, and hope, you’re choking them
By night-forcing on them that stale, ancient opium!
O shutters of the human Bible! Sextons
Of art, of science, and of masters that are ex-!, gone!,
And of the truth with which man spells sky scrabble—
You turn this vast temple into a tiny chapel!
Jailers of spirit, you scoundrels whose ‘acumen’
Leads Beauty on a leash, and locks-away blue heaven,
You take Theocritus, Aeschylus in his sacred veil,
Tibullus filled with love, Virgil through whom stars sail,
And turn all these paradises into hell!

And, my rage mounting, I resumed:
———————————————— Cursed! Fell!
Those deaf monasteries! hated prisons! Pigsty!
Oh! what was done of old to the pedant of Veii?—
Breeches down, old tiger! Schoolboys! schoolboys!
Come swarming, by the thousand, come in convoys,
From the Paris urchin to the Old Roman ‘Greekling’;
Cut green wood, and give that man a good thrashing!
Young mouths, bite the one who ties on the gags!
The shop-window dummy who’s wearing just rags
Has just as much wit as that pedant in his hut,
And just as much heart as that one has fat gut
Full of Latin and Greek as if all stuffed with hay.
Ah! I call Phyllodoce and Xanthis to relay
That I am in love with their bright-coloured tunics;
Whilst hating the vile heap of those pedant-eunuchs!
Entrusting a child—think it—to those black-clad
Pseudo-scholars! One might as well, by God,
Lock up a fly in a tarantula’s house!
Those monks explain Plato, they’r reading Catullus,
Tacitus recounting the great Agricola,
Lucretius!— deciphering Homer, those infusoria?
Those deacons, those beadles with snuffling snouts!
Skulls spewing night, paws ready to grout,
Old oafs with high airs, triumphant brows wild,
Who don’t even know how to spell ‘the child’!
Know nothing of how souls are born, how to foster.
They’ve only La Harpe and Nonotte in their cloister!
They’re stuck on the heart’s A, B, C, D plateau;
They’re the pinched Yesterday trying kill Tomorrow;
Offer their eaglets stale crawfishy rules
And those black shards reeking of vices of fools.
Oh, old goblets chipped by thirsts dare not confess!
Their plural meas culpas take an added ‘S’;
Mysterious he-goats bristle seeing them chaff,
And hearing “Love”—heavens and earth!—cross themself.
Their dead, withered innards insult hearts florescent.
They look down their noses at all adolescents,
They just won’t accept the light entering heart
In the guise of a thought or as woman’s part.
When the Muse appears, these clamorous scoffers
Cry: “Who is this madwoman coming to mock us?"
And, faced by her beauty, brought out by her light,
They sneer: “Harsh colors: the shades are too bright;
Vapours, illusions, dreams—what whim perverse
Makes you cram such a rainbow now into your verse?”
They mock the children, they mock the poets’ lines;
Glare at the nightingales with great owl-eyes;
The child’s just ignorant; they are the pedants of ignorance;
Striking out soul, splendour, and the dawn’s glance;
They weed out the ideal as if it were a solecism,
And those bottle-bottom eyes scorn upon the prism!

Thus I was heard: crying out in my chains.

The monologue had time to shift and change.
And I grew exasperated, committing great wrong—
I was right in substance, yet awry in form.
And after Abbé Tuet, I cursed all Bézout brought;
For, beyond the drudgery that dissolves all thought,
I was then in the clutches of mathematics.
Dark times! A child stirred by poetry’s phatics,
A poor bird banging my skull against the bars,
Sent alive to ‘the numbers’—black executioners;
They forced me to swallow algebra’s dimness;
Shackled me deep inside Boisbertrand’s grimness;
They twisted me, from my wing-tip to my beak,
Upon X and Y and Z’s hideous rack;
Alas! Crammed beneath my maxillaries
The theorem, decked out with all its corollaries;
And I struggled, a lugubrious patient
Aiding the divisor and abetting the quotient.
Hence my cries!

———————One day, when mankind grows sage,
When birds are no longer taught by their cage,
When misshapen societies grasp what is different
Their minds lifted high through the better-known infant,
When—having fathomed the rules of free flight—
We all know the law of the eagle’s birthright,
And when high noon shines for us all, replete:
As knowledge is sublime, then learning will be sweet.
Then, when all will essay mountain-peak etudes
The great Latin-Greek books—those high solitudes
Where lightning rumbles, sea gleams, starlight laughs,
Filled with vast winds of the spirit that blasts—
It is by illuminating with tender good,
By making them loved, we’ll make them understood.
Homer will sweep dazzled schoolboys to sea
In his vast, surging tide; the child will no longer be
A beast of burden yoked to Virgil;
And no longer shall we see that keen spirit, agile,
Become, under some pedant or abbot’s hard whip,
The heavy, wheezing horse of bogged-down hardship.
In a rustic temple, bathed in light, each village class a
Replacement—in place of the old schoolmaster
So gloomy no daylight could never penetrate—
The clear-sighted, true teacher: a magistrate
Of progress, a healer of ignorance, a priest
Of the ideal; we’ll see vanish into the mist
The eternal schoolboy and the eternal pedant.
Dawn comes singing, not growls of dread. And
Our sons will laugh at us in that bright new reach;
They’ll wonder how we ever hoped to teach
The sparrow by means of the haggard owl’s rage.
And then, the young mind and the youthful gaze
Shall rise to the skies with serene clarity
Towards august, kindly, sovereign verity;
Then, no more obscure tomes, dull, stifling, awful;
The teacher—bending over the child, sweet apostle—
Shall pour out God, blue sky, and true comradeship, Bid the little soul drink from the infinite cup.
Then all shall be true—dogmas, rights, duties, laws.
You shall let pass, through your dark pillars you shall let pass,
A pure gleam, less dim day by day, shall grow—
O Nature, alphabet of great letters of shadow!

Paris, May 1831.

12. Vere Novo

How the morning laughs upon the weeping roses!
Oh! charming little lovers that the flower possesses!
It is only in the jasmines, only in periwinkles
That this dazzling display of wild white twinkles
Coming and going, that come back shuttering,
Reopening, in one vast and gentle fluttering.
O spring! When one thinks of all the billets doux
From dreamy lovers to pensive beauties, who
Entrusted to paper their hearts, of those heaps
Of letters penned on taffeta-fine sheets,
Of messages of love, intoxication gay,
Received in April and torn up in May—
Imagine them flying away, at the glad wind’s whim,
In meadows, woods, water, to the very skies’ rim,
And roaming everywhere, seeking a soul,
Running to the flower upon leaving the girl,
The little white fragments the winds scatters fly,
Of all the love notes that become butterflies.

May 1831

11: Lise

I was twelve; she was going-on sixteen.
She was tall, I was on the small side.
To speak with her more freely at evening,
I would wait for her mother to go outside;
Then I’d come in and sit next to her chair
To speak more free in the evening, there.

How many blooms trampled by Time’s quick feet!
How many fires quenched, how many sealed tombs!
Does anyone remember that hearts once beat?
Does anyone remember that roses bloomed?
She loved me. I loved her. We were, in God’s sight,
Two pure children, two fragrances, two rays of light.

God had made her angel, fairy, princess.
And since she was by so much taller than I,
My asking her questions could be endless
For the sheer pleasure of saying to her: “Why?”
And many times, she would shyly evade all
My dreamy gaze that made her so heedful.

Then I’d regale her with all my chitchatting,
Show her my games, my swift top, my large ball;
I was so proud to be learning my Latin;
I showed her my Phaedrus and my Virgil;
I braved all things; nothing was stopping us there;
I’d tell her: “My father’s an army officer.”

Latin is needful, even for girls, for Lise,
Dreamily to spell out its words—to look
Translating a verse at church-service to please her
I would often lean over her prayerbook.
A stone angel spread its white wing to crest us
As we attended Sunday Vespers.

She would say of me: “Oh, he’s only a child!”
And I would call her Mademoiselle Lise.
To translate a psalm for her, quite often I’d,
Lean over her book at church to please her;
And then one day—oh, heavens!—you saw it:
Her blooming cheek touched my burning lip.

Young loves, whose blossoms so swiftly unfold,
You are the heart’s dawn and morning’s tomorrow.
Enchant the child, O raptures untold!
And when evening comes, bringing sorrow,
Enchant our dazzled souls once more deftly,
Young loves, that disappear so swiftly!

May 1843.

10. To Madame D. G. de G.

Once I said to you: “Live, Madame—reign!
The salon awaits you! Success calls your name!
The dazzling ball grows pale at your going!
Be illustrious, beautiful! Love! Laugh! Show, sing!
You own the splendour of roses and stars!
Your charming gaze, in which I read your memoirs,
Complements your light and your most graceful words.
Your mouth’s sparkles on your eyes conferred.
It seems, when sorrow sometimes makes you fear,
The drop of a pearl, and never a tear.
Even when you are dreaming, you can still smile.
Live, feted and proud, O golden-haired belle!”
Now you are pale, solemn, silent, you know it,
Dead, and transfigured; I say to you: “Poet!
Come fetch me! Archangel! Mysteriously be!
Make earth and heavens transparent to me!
Reveal to me, let your profound mouth say the word,
The great human enigma, secret of the world!
Confirm to me Descartes and Spinoza too!
You know the true name of the One who broke through—
So that we might see His light shining far—
Holes in dark ceiling we like to call stars!
For I feel you hovering beneath low tree limbs;
Your invisible lyre holding your sublime hymns!
My sombre ocean, on which the skiff floats rager,
Both terrifies and delights you; for holy nature—
Eternal nature, the fields, and woods choice—
Speak of your great soul with their mighty voice!"

Paris, 1840. — Jersey, 1855.

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.

8. CONTINUATION

For words—let it be known—are living lights.
The dreamer’s hand vibrates, tremblingly writes;
The pen, stretching its reach like a wing, lurches
Quivers on paper as this figure emerges—
The word, the term, archetype from a dark source,
Invisible face, tracing an unknown course;
Created by whom? Forged by whom? Shadowkind;
Rising and falling within our dark minds,
Always finding its meaning as water finds its level;
Formula of the brief gleams within the brain’s vessel.

Yes, all must understand words are things, are those.
That tumble pell-mell in the dark abyss of prose,
Or rouse verse—that stormtossed forest—til it sings.
Word holds the secret of the Human Spirit—that sphinx.
Word wills or refuses, rushes forth—fairy or bacchante—
Offers itself, gives, or flees; before Nero’s chant
Or a rhyming Charles IX, it recoils in amazement;
One word is a smile, another’s a gaze sent;
Of some profound word we are all disciples;
Every force on earth finds the word multiple;
Moulded by the brain—brisk or slow, grave or shorn—
The hollow of the human skull gives it form;
The old imprint remains there beside the new;
What one word cannot grasp, another will show;
Words strike the brow like waves on a reef;
They teem, opening us to what is pensive,
Spread claws or hands and, some of them, wings;
As a blackened hearth shows its sparks’ wanderings,
Dreamy, sad, joyful, bitter, sweet or sinister—
A dark host, words come and go within us there;
Words are the mysterious wayfarers of the soul.

Each one casts a shadow or makes flames unroll;
Each of them guards a province of the brain;
Why? Because Word’s name is Legion; each strain
In accordance with lightning that brightly plays there,
Performs a unique task in the common labour;
Because from these signs and sounds in chorus
That, whether writing or speaking, we drive before us
Are born cries and orations, sighs and songs;
Everywhere—a dwarf hidden beneath all these tongues—
The word treads down and enslaves worldwide;
And, just as man is the animal wherein abides
The soul—that light from above the body hides here—
So God makes the word the beast of the Idea.

The word makes the very depths of our minds flourish.
It stirs—speaking names like “Beatrice”, “Lycoris”—
Dante at the Campo Santo, Virgil at Posillipo.
In the ocean of thought it is the dark polypo
When a book springs up from Aeschylus or Manu,
When Saint John at Patos writes upon his knee, so,
One sees, amidst verse crammed with hydras and strigae,
Monstrous words crawling through works that are mighty.

O intangible hand! O astonishing power!
Place a word upon a man, and, shuddering over,
He withers and dies, pierced by that profound force;
Attach vengeful word to the whole world’s torso,
That world—dragging with it shields, scaffolds, swords,
Laws, customs, gods—crumbles under the word.
Omnipotence vast issued from human lips;
Earth lies beneath words as flies swarm over tips.
The word devours; nothing can withstand its bite.
At its breath—aided by the soul and by the light—
Sombre enormity slow peels away.
Puts dark strength in those whom nothing can sway;
Cato bears this syllable in his loins: No.
Great obstinate souls—Brutus, Columbus, Zeno—
Held that flaming word under eyelids that shone:
Hope! — It can pry open a mouth of stone
Within the dread enclosure where the dead are buried,
And lo, the petrified Don Juan turns livid!
It turns marble to spectre, man into a statue.
It strikes, wounds, it leaves its mark, resurrects, slays you.
Nimrod cries: War! Then, from Ganges to Ilissus,
Iron gleams, blood flows. Love one another! says Jesus,
And this word shines forever, upon all of us
Echoing throughout the vast cosmos—even Tiberius,
The heavens, flowers, upon man remade aright—
The blazing love that flows from the Infinite!

In the days when earth opened its first flowerhead,
The first man uttered the very first word,
The word born of his lips—heard by all creation—
Met the light in the heavens and its iteration:
Was: “Sister!
—————Take flight! Soar high! Never die!
Kindle the star! … forever fill up the eye!
Warm ethers, blue depths, spheres, fiery orbs-spinner;
Light up the outer world, while I light up the inner.
You shall be one life, the other I’ll cross all.
Be the tongue of flame, my sister; I’m the apostle.
Arise, banish shadow, and dazzle the horizon,
Be the dawn; I’m your equal, for my name Reason;
Yours the eyes, mine the brows. O sister, blonde-curled,
Beneath the web of Light, you shall grasp the world;
With your golden rays, you shall make cleave
Landscapes and suns, blooms and glassy wave,
Fields and skies; and I, I shall bind men’s mouths;
And over man—swept up in a thousand wild flights—
Weave, with threads of harmony and day, prove
The capture of every heart in Love’s mighty weave.
I existed before the soul; Adam is not my pere.
I was here even before you; Light could not appear,
Sans me from abyss where chained-things crawl, held there;
My name is Fiat Lux, and I am your elder!”

Yes, Word is all-potent. Only the fool defies it!
When error ties a knot in man, Word unties it.
It is lightning in shadow, worm in ripe apple.
It blasts from a trumpet, it trembles to clap wall,
And Belshazzar staggers, and Jericho crumbles.
It is one with the people, being itself great numbers.
It’s life, soul, fire, hurricane, virtue, seedpod;
For the word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.

Jersey, October 1854.

7. Response to an Indictment

So I am the ogre and I’m the scapegoat
At this era’s chaotic, heart-wrenching date:
Who trampled good taste and old French verse? Me.
And—ghastly deed—I told the shadow to: “Be!”
And the shadow was. — That why you’re censuring me.
Language, art, tragedy, dogma, Conservatory—
I am the culprit when all of that old light
Is extinguished; I emptied the urn of night.
I am the clumsy axe, cause of this Brexit;
That is your view. OK; I accept it;
I’m the one your angry prose aims to tank;
Attack me as “Raca” and I reply: “Thanks!”
This (quote) “march of time”—one church’s ‘bye-byes’
Only to join with another, grow ‘civilized’;
These questions (important) of ‘art’, ‘liberty’—
Let’s, by your leave, take them—with humility,
Peer through the wrong end of the spyglass, we can
See I confess it—me (yes!) horrible man;
And though I believe I have really committed
Other crimes worse—which you’ve intermitted—
A meddler in curious questions, mine, yours,
Having probed various illnesses, looked for the cures,
Insulted the bullshits of ancient stupidity,
Shaken from bottom to top past’s avidity,
Ravaged the substance and form, and not least,
I stand by this: I am that hideous beast,
I am the horrible demagogue, freed,
The destroyer of the old A-B-C-D;
Let’s chat.

———Out of school—translation drills
Latin verse—solemn child, shy, pale and chilled,
With brooding brow and feeble limbs; I tried
When, seeking to understand and judge, to open wide
My eyes to nature, art, language—overwhelmed
Commoner and noble—mirroring the realm;
Poetry was, simply, monarchy; a word
Was either mere scribbler, or else duke or lord;
Syllables, nothing more than side-by-siders,
Paris and London; like pedestrians and riders
Cross the Pont Neuf without merging align;
Language was the State before ‘’89;
Words, noble or base, lived in closed castes;
Some, noble, haunting the Phèdres and Jocastes,
The Méropes, bound by the law of decorum,
Riding Versailles in the King’s coach-and-four, them;
The others—a beggar pack, fodder for gallows—
Dwelt down in dialects; some in the galleys
Of slang; consigned to the lowest of genres,
In rags, tattered in market halls; no shoes on there,
Wigless; made for prose and farce, bad shows;
A stylistic rabble disposed in the shadows;
Villeins, boors, peasants—that Vaugelas, their chief
In the Lexicon’s prison, had branded with “F”,
Breathing only the abject and banal air,
Base, bourgeois, branded, low—fit for Molière.
Racine looked askance at these rogues, these perverse;
Where if Corneille found one caught-up in his verse,
He kept it—too great a man to say: “Just go!”
As Voltaire cried out: “Corneille’s stooping low!”
Good old Corneille, humble, doesn’t reply.
Then I came—the brigand; I shouted out: “Why
Must these always be first, and those last?”
And upon the Academy—that dowager matriarch
Hiding shocked tropes beneath her skirts’ grand screens—
And upon the battalions of stiff alexandrines,
I unleashed a revolutionary wind’s flurry:
I crowned with a red cap the old dictionary.
No more “senator” words! No more “commoner” reps!
I whipped up a storm in the inkwell’s depths,
Amidst swirling shadows, I mingled and stirred
White swarms of ideas with the dark throng of words;
And I said: “There’s no word on which an idea, in full flight,
Cannot, still dewy with the azure, alight!”
A dreadful utterance! — hypallage, litotes, syllepsis
Trembled; at the milestone ‘Aristotle’, I climbed up this
And declared all words equal, free, and sovereign.
All the invaders and all the robbers who got in—
Those tigers, Huns, Scythians, Dacians and worse—
Were, beside my audacity, mere yapping curs;
I leapt from the circle and shattered the compasses.
Called the pig by its name; why is it not done as is?
Guicciardini called out the Borgias; Tacitus,
Vitellius. Fierce, implacable, back at this
I ripped the collar of ‘epithets’ from the neck
Of the dumbfounded dog in the yard out back.
On the shadowed grass, I made heifer and cow play nice—
Margoton one, and the other Bérénice.
Then the Ode, embracing Rabelais, grew beerier;
Atop Mount Pindus, they danced the Ça Ira;
The nine Muses, bare-breasted, sang Carmagnole;
Grandiloquence shivered in its Spanish stole;
The muleteer Jean married shepherdess Myrtle.
A king asked: “What time is it?” With actions mortal
I killed alabaster, snow, ivory, ice;
I stripped out the jet from the black of the eyes,
And dared tell the arm: “Be white—simply show it me."
Thus violating the steaming corpse of poetry;
I forced the number in—shock!—Mithridates
Cite Cyzicus’s siege? I’d say what the date is.
Days of dread! Laïses became whores-on-the-go.
And many words—groomed each morning by Restaut,
And retaining the stately bearing of Louis Quatorze—
Still much bewigged; and at these coiffures,
The Revolution, from the top of its steeple,
Shouted: Reform! Now’s the time! Fill up, people,
From the soul of these words you’ve tried to restrain!
And the wig itself roared, and shook out its mane.
Liberty! this is the way, in our rebellions,
We took certain spaniels and fashioned them fell lions,
And that, under the cursed hurricane that we blew,
All kinds of words could come flaming bright through.
On Lhomond’s Grammar I stuck a proclamation.
It read: “We have to complete this, great nation!
To the basket with Bouhours, Brossettes, Batteux!
They took man’s thought and applied the thumbscrew.
To arms, prose and verse! Brigades, rally the flag!
See where we are now when verse has been gagged,
The ode has irons on its feet, the drama’s under lock-key.
Campistron swarms over Racine’s dead body! —”
Boileau just gritted his teeth; I had to shout:
“Quiet!” I yelled through the storm’s thunderbolt:
“War on all rhetorics, peace to all syntaxes!
And the whole ’93 burst out. This axis,
Saw them all turn-round: athos, ithos and pathos.
The soldiers, releasing Pourceaugnac and Cathos,
Pursuing Dumarsais to their low-dive, loud-dingy,
Where Permesse’s enema waters syringed him.
The syllable, crushed the law tying it down,
Verbs as pariahs, the low peasant noun,
All came running. We drank the horror to the dregs.
Unearthing what Athalie dreams of in bed;
They scattered the ashes of story, the wind whips,
From Theramenes to star ‘Institute’s eclipse.
Yes, they made a clean sweep of the ancien regime,
And I clapped hands, drank from sentences’ bloodstream,
When I saw, by the foaming strophe, and saying
Things in a style both enormous and braying,
The Art of Poetry caught in the common road,
And when I saw, in among the rushing crowd,
By all the words denied by good taste’s rule-setter,
From the spirit lamppost hang the aristocrat letter.
Yes, I am that Danton! I am this Robespierre!
I have, fighting Noble Word with its long rapier,
Incited the ignoble slave-word to turncoat,
And, once Dangeau was dead, I slit Richelet’s throat.
Yes, it’s the truth, these are some of my crimes.
I captured and broke-up the Bastille of rhymes.
I did more: I snapped-off each-every iron shackle
That chained the Word people, and brought up from black hell
Sepulchral legions—the elder damned phrases;
I have crushed the word-coils with my own periphrasis,
And mixed, confused, levelled beneath skies of sable
The alphabet, dark tower, born out of Babel;
I was not unaware what the wrathful hand brought:
He who sets-free the word, sets-free the thought.

In man’s efforts unity’s the attributive term.
Everything the same arrow that hits the same aim.

So, yes, it’s here, in honest style attributed,
Various of my sins, and also I bring my head.
You must be of the older generation, Grandpa,
For the tenth time I perform mea culpa.
Yes, if Beauzée is god, then I’m an atheist.
The language was in order, dust-free, august,
A gold fleur-de-lys, Tristan-Boileau, blue ceiling,
The forty armchairs and the throne in-betweening;
Illustrious salon! And here I besmeared
Broke pretty much the whole lot; the peasant Proper Word
Was only a corporal: I promoted him colonel;
I made a Jacobin of the Pronoun Personal,
And the Participle, a slave with white-hairs,
A hyena: I made Verb one of anarchy’s hydras.
There’s my confitentem reum! Storm blows!
I said to the nostril: “Why you’re just a nose!”
I said to the golden fruit: “you’re just a pear!”
I said to Vaugelas: You are just a jaw!
I said in words: Be a republic! Just be
The immensest anthill, and work! And believe!
Love! live! — I set all in motion, and, morose,
I threw noble verse to the black dogs of prose.

And what I did, others have also done;
And better. Calliope, Euterpe’s chill tone,
Polymnia, they’ve lost their false gravity.
We are tipping the scales of heroic poetry.
That’s right, curse us. Lines which, on their brow
Formerly, wore twelve feathers in a row,
And shuttlecock-leapt from the doubled racket
One we call prosody and one etiquette,
Now breaka all the rules, evade the scissors’ snip,
And escape, changing in flight to a bird, slip
From the caesura cage, flee to the ravine,
And fly in the skies, you lark of the divine.

All words are now soaring into clarity.
Writers have gifted the language liberty.
And, thanks to these bandits, to these dog-eat-dogs,
Truth, hunting swarms of those sad pedagogues,
Imagination, with a hundred voices, noisy,
Breaking the mind-windows of the bourgeoisie,
Triple-faced Poetry, who laughs, sighs, sings chorus,
Who mocks and believes; whom Shakespeare and Plautus
Planted, to the mob, and to those of low station;
Who pours out the wisdom of Job to the nations
And Horace’s good sense, will through her furor;
Her immense frenzy intoxicate the azure,
And who, sacred madwoman with dazzling eyes,
Ascends to eternity through the time as it flies,
The muse reappears, and restores us again,
Starts weeping once more over all human pain,
Strikes and consoles, from zenith to nadir,
Making all foreheads to shine bright and clear
Her flight, lyre of whirlwind, tempest sparkings,
And her millions of eyes on her millions of wings.

The movement thus brings-in its own conclusion.
Thanks to you, holy progress, this Revolution
Vibrates in the air now, in voice, in book.
In the throbbing word, the reader feels it life-stuck.
It cries out, it sings, teaches, its laughter rolls.
Its tongue is unshackled, as so is its soul.
It is in the novel, speaks softly to women.
It opens two eyes in which light is now flaming,
One on the thinker, the other on the citizen.
It takes Liberty, its sister, in its grip again,
And enters in every man through every pore.
Prejudice, formed like coral reef shore
From the sombre accreditation of ills over time,
Breaks at the impact of her floating rhyme
Full of her will, and her purpose, her soul.
She is prose, she is verse, she is drama, she’s all;
She is expression, she’s true sentiment,
Light in the streets, star in the firmament.
She penetrates depths of the language deep down;
Breathes life into art, is a strong megaphone;
And, as is God’s will, having filled to increase
The people with her pride, erased the old crease
From their brows, and raised the crowd out of their fear,
And, having become Law, she becomes Idea!

Paris, January 1834.

6. COUNTRY LIFE

Countryside evenings: folk are walking around—
The poor man in his field, the rich in his grounds;
Me, I walk as the path leads me; the poet
Is home in God’s land: the all-where and through it.
I gladly walk solus. I ponder, hear nature talk.
Yet if someone asks me to join-in my walk,
I accept. Everyone carries something inside,
And each man’s a book in which God Himself writes.
And whenever one of these books comes my way—
A volume in which a soul lives, sealed by the grave—
I read it.

——So, here’s evening. I set out—I’m free—
I go, passing by, call on friends in amity.
We enjoy the cool air in the garden an hour.
The evening dew dampens the seats in the bower;
No matter! I sit down, and—can hardly doubt me—
All the little children come gather about me.
As soon as I’m seated they hurry around, all.
It’s because they know I share their tastes; they recall
That I love, as they do, air, butterflies, flowers,
And all the creatures that run through the furrows.
They know I am a man who loves them, adores,
A person with whom they can play, and make noise:
Shout, chatter, speak at the top of their lungs;
I used to laugh like them—and more—when I was young
And here now, whenever I watch them at play,
I beam a smile at them, though sadder today;
They say—sweet friends—I just don’t know how
To get angry; that I’m fun to be with; they avow
I make cardboard toys, and pen-and-ink sketches;
I tell—at the hour when the lamplight fetches—
Oh! charming tales that make you shiver at night,
That show I am gentle and humble and right.

So, the moment I’m seen—“There he is!"—they all run.
They leave games, hoops, and balls; they gather as one
With their beautiful, wide child-eyes—fearless, kind—
That seem always blue, as reflecting the sky!
The little ones—when one is small, one is brave—
Climb onto my knees; the older ones look grave;
They bring me blackbird nests they have found,
Albums, and pencils from Paris; turn round
With a hundred things to tell me now and after;
Chatting and laughing—and I love their laughter,
Not the mock-laugh of sarcasm, bitter and sharp
But sweet honest laugh opening mouths opening hearts,
Revealing both pearly teeth and souls in breast.

I admire their pencils, their books, blackbird nests;
And then, when I’ve finished admiring, they say:
“He’s in agreement with monsieur le curé!”
Then, when they’ve all of them chatted their share,
Suddenly—the older ones leant on my chair,
And the little ones still clustered on my knees—
They fall into silence that means: “Tell us, please.”

I tell them of everything. My words sow free
Ideas and facts in them. Because they love me,
They love what I say. I point out what’s ours:
The sky, God who hides there, the visible stars.
Everything—even their gaze—listens. I tell them
How to think, dream, how to seek. God blesses man,
Not for having found, but for having looked-for.
I say: Give alms to the humble, broken-down poor.
Accept every lesson, each rebuke with good grace.
To give and receive is to grow soul apace!
I tell them of life, and how, in sorrows and fears,
Kindness must lie at the heart of our tears;
And how, in our joys and our wild ecstasies,
Kindness must lie in our laughs’ revelries;
That being good means: to live well; that suffering
Can drive all things from a soul, except loving;
And that wicked men, in their deep hatred’s dearth,
Are wrong to blame God. Great God! No man on earth
Has the right, in walking the path as he picked it,
To say it was You, God, who fashioned him wicked;
For the wicked man, Lord, is not needed by You.

Also I tell them of history; the sorrow
Of the Jews—cursed, yet destined for blessing;
Of Greece, who lit up every future’s progressing;
Of Rome; ancient Egypt, its shadeless plains bare,
And all the dark sinister sights found there.
Fearful locations! All’s death. Man’s voice drops
Seeing those demons carved from granite blocks—
A monstrous Olympus of dark ages gone—
Sphinxes, Anubises, Mercuries, Ammons—
They’ve sat in the desert for four thousand years.
Around them the wind blows, the burning sand rears
Up like a sea from which huge heads emerge;
The mutilated stone retains some rough image
Of statue or spectre, recalling in place
The folds of a sheet draped on a corpse’s face;
You can still make out the mouth, the brow, nose, some-
Thing of eyes, then—I don’t know—fierce, loathsome,
Creature that gazes and lives—vague, ghastly mask.
At nighttime a traveller hurrying past
Is seized with dread—fancies the starlight reveals
Great giants, chained and mute, underneath veils.

La Terrasse, August 1840

5. To André Chénier

Yes, my verse plans to, without stooping low,
Borrow from prose’s more casual flow.
André, it’s true: my lyre is sometimes jokesome.
Here’s why: While still young, when reading the darksome
Fearful Book of the Forest and Water,
I dwelt in a sombre park where birds would chatter,
Teardrops smiling in periwinkles’ blue eyes.
One day, as I mused alone amidst the boughs,
A bullfinch—the woods’ own gossip-columnist—
Said to me: “Why do you walk the earth solemnest?
Nature just doesn’t take mankind too seriously;
O poet, your songs—or what you call poesy—
Would more resemble her if you let out some air.
The woods have sighs, but they also have blares.
The azure gleams—gaiety pulls it apart;
Olympus retains grandeur even with laughs;
Don’t think the poet in spirit declines
When a word dances-by between two lofty lines.
The high frenzied wind is not only a mourner;
The deep tide is no sentimental song-crooner;
And Nature, through ages and nights, avanti
Yokes Rabelais to the sorrows of Dante,
And dark Ugolino to Grandgousier’s malform is
Displaying both huge grief and laughter enormous.

Les Roches, July 1830

IV

The heavens are filled with a vast clarity;
All is glad joy, innocent hope, bonhomie.
The fine lake the valley encircles is bright;
The field coming fertile, the vine coming ripe;
All is sap, life and sound—everything teems,
Green boughs, blue shimmer, watery gleams,
Little birds bickering one with another.
What does the butterfly have? The grasshopper?
Grasshopper has grass, and the butterfly air;
And they both have April, laughing skies clear.
Rising from all, Nature’s joyful refrain there;
A song soft ascending that turns into prayer.
The chick runs, the child plays and dances, the lamb
Leaps, and—letting its water fall, dram by dram—
The old grotto’s human face tenderly weeps;
The wind reads some text to a presence (that keeps
Itself hidden) from God’s greatest poem;
Bird speaks to fragrance; flower to sunbeam;
Over the ponds green tents raised by the pine;
The nests are warm. Azure finds earth is sublime;
Wave and sphere; all climates blurring together;
Here autumn, here summer, here springtime weather.
Oh hillsides! Oh field! Gusts, sighs, breath sustains!
The hosanna of forests and rivers, and plains
Rises solemnly to the day’s Father, above;
And all things here whitened are stanzas of love;
The swan declares: “Light!” and the lily says: “Mercy!”
And like a vast ear the sky attends to this melody.
Evening comes; and the globe, now, is struck-sight,
Becomes an enormous eye gazing at night;
It savours, enraptured, holiness sans end there,
The contemplation of empyrean splendour,
The clouds of black crêpe and silver, the height,
Which majestically blesses and blazes with light,
The constellations—those hydras of stars—
The emanations of the dark and the deep, blurs
Your outpourings, O diamond expanse,
And all of the shadow with all radiance!
The infinite rising in ecstatic streams.
And, all the while Satan the Envious dreams.

The Terrace, April 1840.