* * *

Paul Verlaine

The Faun

          (Fêtes Galants: Le Faune)

An ancient faun of terra-cotta

Centring the bowling-green

Laughs, without doubt presaging,

A sad end to this time serene,

Which has led me and has led you,

Melancholy pilgrims lean,

To this hour whose vanishing

Swirls to the sounding tambourine.

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. 

Claire De Lune

          (Fêtes Galants: Claire de Lune)

Your soul is the choicest of countries

Where charming maskers, masked shepherdesses,

Go playing their lutes and dancing, yet gently

Sad beneath fantastic disguises.

While they sing in a minor key

Of all-conquering love and careless fortune,

They seem to mistrust their own fantasy

And their song melts away in the light of the moon,

In the quiet moonlight, lovely and sad,

That makes the birds dream in the trees, all

The tall water-jets sob with ecstasies,

The slender water-jets rising from marble.