Twilight of a Mystical Evening

Paul Verlaine

(Poèmes Saturniens: Paysages Tristes II, Crépuscule du Soir Mystique)

Memory with Twilight glows

And trembles on the fiery horizon

Of burning Hope that shrinks and grows

Like some mysterious partition

Where the flowers in profusion

– Dahlias, lilies, tulips and marigolds –

Fly round a trellis in their circulation

Among the heady exhalation

Of heavy perfumes, whose warm poison

– Dahlias, lilies, tulips and marigolds –

Drowning my senses, soul and reason,

Mingles in their immense confusion

Memory with Twilight’s glows.

Dusk

(Poèmes Saturniens: Paysages Tristes VI, L’Heure du Berger)

The moon is red on the misted horizon;

In a fog that dances, the meadow

Sleeps in the smoke, frogs bellow

In green reeds through which frissons run;

The lilies close their shutters,

The poplars stretch far away,

Tall and serried, their spectres stray;

Among bushes the fireflies flicker;

The owls are awake, in soundless flight

They row through the air on heavy wings,

The zenith fills, sombrely glowing.

Pale Venus emerges, and it is Night.

The Nightingale

(Poèmes Saturniens: Paysages Tristes VII, Le Rossignol)

Like a loud flight of birds, dark complexity,

All my memories beating down on me, 

Beating down through the yellow foliage

Of my heart’s bent alder-trunk, its gaze

Silvered violet in the lake of Regret,

Whose melancholy is still flowing yet,

Beat down, and then the evil murmur

That a moist rising breeze quells there,

Dies away by degrees in the leaves, so

In an instant you will hear no more, oh,

No more than a voice extolling the Absent,

No more than the voice – oh, languishment! –

Of the bird, my First Love, that still sings

As it did long ago on those first evenings;

And below the sad splendour of the moon

Rising in pale solemnity, a June 

Night, melancholy, heavy with summer,

Full of silence and darkness, in the azure

That a gentle wind brushes, rocks asleep

The tree that trembles, the nightingale that weeps.