of Théophile Gautier

O you, the fatal emblem of our happiness!

Greetings from dementia and the pale libation
Do not believe I offer my empty cup
In the magic hope of the corridor where a golden monster suffers!
Your appearance won’t be enough for me:
Because I alone have put you in a place of porphyry.
The rite is for the hands to extinguish the torch
Against the thick iron doors of the tomb:
And one knows it not, badly, chosen for our very
Simple feast to sing the absence of the poet
For this beautiful monument encloses him completely.
Except for the burning glory of the craft,
Till the common and vile hour of ashes
Returns toward the fires of the pure and mortal sun
By the pane which lights an evening proud to fall there!

Magnificent, total and solitary, such
Trembles to escape the false pride of the men
This wild crowd! It announces: we are
The sad opacity of our future spectra.
But the image of grief scattered on blank walls
I disdained the lucid horror of a tear,
When, deaf himself to my sacred verse which did not alarm him
Some one of these passers-by, proud, blind and dumb,
Guest of his vague shroud, transmuted
Into the virgin hero of the posthumous wait.
A vast chasm brought in the gathered haze
By the short-tempered wind of words that he did not speak,
The Void to this man since abolished:
Memories of horizons, what is it, o you, what is the Earth?
Howl this dream, and voice whose clarity fades,
The space has for a toy the cry, “I do not know!”

The Master, by a profound eye, on his steps
Has calmed the uneasy miracle from paradise
Whose final thrill in his voice alone awakens
The mystery of a name for the Rose and the Lily.
Is there nothing that remains of this fate? Is there?
O all of you, forget a darker creed.
The splendid eternal genius has no shadow.
I, because of your anxious desire, I want to see
Who fainted yesterday, in ideal obligation
That we have to the gardens of this star
Surviving for the honour of quiet disaster
A solemn agitation by the air
Of words, purple, drunk and big clear calyx,
Which, rain and diamond, the translucent glance
Rests on these flowers there that do not fade
Isolates among the hour and the ray of the day!

It is the abode already of our true groves,
Where the pure poet’s humble and wide gesture
To forbid the dream, enemy of his charge
So that the morning of his haughty rest
When the ancient death is as for Gautier
To not open his sacred eyes and to keep silent
Appears, about the dependent ornamental path,
The solid tomb where everything that can harm rests,
And the stingy silence and massive night.

10/08/08