The Clown Chastised

Stéphane Mallarmé

Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn

Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand

As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps,

Here’s a window in the walls of cloth I’ve torn.

With legs and arms a limpid treacherous swimmer

With endless leaps, disowning the sickness

Hamlet! It’s as if I began to build in the ocean depths

A thousand tombs: to vanish still virgin there.

Mirthful gold of a cymbal beaten with fists,

The sun all at once strikes the pure nakedness

That breathed itself out of my coolness of nacre,

Rancid night of the skin, when you swept over me,

Not knowing, ungrateful one, that it was, this make-up,

My whole anointing, drowned in ice-water perfidy.

Distress
 

I don’t come to conquer your flesh tonight, O beast
In whom are the sins of the race, nor to stir

In your foul tresses a mournful tempest

Beneath the fatal boredom my kisses pour:

A heavy sleep without those dreams that creep

Under curtains alien to remorse, I ask of your bed,

Sleep you can savour after your dark deceits,

You who know more of Nothingness than the dead.

For Vice, gnawing this inborn nobleness of mine

Marked me, like you, with its sterility,

But shroud-haunted, pale, destroyed, I flee

While that heart no tooth of any crime

Can wound lives in your breast of stone,

Frightened of dying while I sleep alone.

The Poem’s Gift

I bring you the child of an Idumean night!

Black, with pale naked bleeding wings, Light

Through the glass, burnished with gold and spice,

Through panes, still dismal, alas, and cold as ice,

Hurled itself, daybreak, against the angelic lamp.

Palm-leaves! And when it showed this relic, damp,

To that father attempting an inimical smile,

The solitude shuddered, azure, sterile.

O lullaby, with your daughter, and the innocence

Of your cold feet, greet a terrible new being:

A voice where harpsichords and viols linger,

Will you press that breast, with your withered finger,

From which Woman flows in Sibylline whiteness to

Those lips starved by the air’s virgin blue?