Part 8

Her sweet voice was a music in mine ear; And in the perfume of the atmosphere Which, in that eve, her shadowy presence shed, "Sister of mystery," trembling I said, "Too like an angel to be what you seem, Go not away too soon, beloved dream!"

Then, smiling as a mother will, she seized My brow, and with soft hands my fever eased.

"Still, thou poor child, this childish fear of me? Thy forehead furrowed by sad memory, Are these a shadow's hands that on it rest? A bright May morn is dawning in thy breast: Is it a phantom's voice that soothes thy grief? But if my beauty be beyond belief, Breathe its terrestrial odour! Part my hair, And take my veil away and make me bare! Thou canst not soil my wings, nor stain the snow Of these frail flowers that in my garden blow; Come, in so fair an evening, spend the treasure Of my veiled loveliness in thy heart's pleasure."

Thus sang the tender voice that needs must fade! And in her kiss the soul was of a maid. But night came from the rim of autumn skies, Came from the forest's shallow, evil eyes.

THE REFUGE.

This is mine hour. Night falls upon my life. I must forego my part in men's keen strife. With conquered step resigned I reach the door, Beloved too late, where none awaits me more. An autumn shudder through the clear, cold sky Runs, interrupting the monotonous cry Shed by a horn astray and desolate, Making me, languidly, smile at my fate....

But all is said. Naught moves me, in the gloam, Save the uneasy hope of this dear home. She lives; my heart, and not mine eye, foresees. The sweetness of the moon, spread on the trees, Veils more and more this happy nook with peace And mystery that bids foreboding cease;

A counsel of forgetfulness is cast Around me, something pensive, good, and vast. And every step I take the more it thrills My soul which yet that ancient quarrel fills. But what shall summer storms betoken, when She breathes the autumn calm she longed for then, And only trembles feeling memories stir Of hearts that loved her well and wounded her.

NATURE.

Slow falls the eve; the hour is grave, profound. The sweet, sad cuckoo makes the air resound With his two notes with springtide languor filled; And the tall pines, by eddying breezes thrilled, Tremble, as ocean echoes in a shell. Else all is hushed. I walk with heart unwell. Slowly the shadow on my path descends. I loiter o'er familiar forest bends, Whose calm grows deeper with the darkening west, O such a calm I feel my own unrest Melt in the peace of landscapes unforeseen; And in the east eve clothes with azure sheen The slender uplands with their billowing chain, Whose silhouettes shut in the distant plain; And on their tops their cloak of forests gleams Through the thin veil of mist that o'er them streams. And all is vague, the ideal form of things Shimmers divine in deep imaginings, Gladdening the eye with grace ineffable; Seeing them, in the enchanted world we dwell Of soulless, happy beings who possess The calm we cry for of forgetfulness, We who desire in desolate hearts that pine, This sovereign gift of peace that makes divine; And most at eve, when quiet nights of spring Enchant the sky, the forest, and the ling. The forest's darkness sways me at its will; And with a holy and unfathomed thrill I feel a dizzy longing grow in me: O not to think! nor wish! O not to be!...

THE HUMBLE HOPE.

Time goes, poor soul, and sterile are thy vows. After our outwatched nights and feverish brows, What do we know, save that we nothing know?

Even as a child a butterfly will chase, Far have I strayed in many a flowering place, And here I tremble in the afterglow.

Yet not despairing in my feebleness, But hoping that the Master still will bless The will to do good that my efforts show.

ELEONORA D'ESTE.

Does thy heart, Tasso, burn for thy Princess? Strive to refine this obscure tenderness, Of which she can accept the flower alone. Save it make nobler, I no love can own. Certes, among the gifts that fate bestows, And the least lovely, as a poet knows,

Some are an offered prey that passions take. But there are others which, if seized, do break; And of these supreme gifts love is the best. If thou indeed dost love me, 'ware thee lest Thy heart forget the reverence it owes, Then may it love, and in love find repose.

THE THINKER.

O thinker! Thou whose heart hath not withstood, For the first time, Spring's beauty in the wood, And who thyself wilt therefore not forgive,

Thy days have passed in pondering o'er the great Enigma man proposes to his fate, And books from life have made thee fugitive.

What boots? Leave to the gods their secret yet, And, while thou livest, taste without regret The sweetness of this simple word: To live.

A SAGE.

He knows dreams never kept their promise yet. Henceforth without desire, without regret, He cons the page of sober tenderness In which some poet, skilled in life's distress, Breathed into olden, golden verse his sighs. Sometimes he lifts his head, and feeds his eyes, With all the wonderment that wise men know, On fields, and clouds that over forests go, And with their calmness sated is his thought.

He knows how dearly fair renown is bought: He too, in earlier days of stinging strength, Sought that vain victory to find at length Sadness at his desire's precipitous brink.... Of what avail, he thought, to act and think, When human joy holds all in one rapt look? His mind at peace reads Nature like a book. He smiles, remembering his youth's unrest, And, though none know it, he is wholly blest.

THEY WHO ARE WORN WITH LOVE.

When, worn with unregenerate delights, The kisses of fair youths grow dull and sicken, They seek, fatigued with hope and outwatched nights, A bed of love that shall the senses quicken.

White bed of love with pillows rich with lace, Caressing curtains sheltering dreamless blisses, And, to grow better from the bought embrace, Upon their wasted brows long trembling kisses.

Calmer than autumn heavens the eyes they crave, In which the bitterness of theirs shall vanish, Lips of a speech impassionate, suave, Which their sick sorrows shall assuage and banish.

Love should be night, and hushed forgetfulness, Never with follies of the past upbraided, Hope still renewed consoling the distress Of dreams come true and in fulfilment faded.

Nor light, nor noise; but in the happy room, With tapestry the walls to sleep beguiling, To kiss the long hands of the mistress whom A plain gown clothes, and who is faintly smiling!

Once they have seen her, and to hear her speak They hoped for her and Heaven, and knelt before her; But love's old burden makes their soul so weak That save with sighs they never dare implore her.

THE CENTAUR.

Oft on my rural youth I dwell in fancy. Ye gods who for our deepest feelings care, If fields and forests evermore entrance me, It is because you set my birthplace there.

With what a love up-welling sweet and tender Upon the august face of earth mine eyes Lingered, and drank her solitary splendour, Bathed in the radiance of calm summer skies!

All was excitement! Valleys richly rounded; The undulating, broadly breasted hills; The vast plains which the veiled horizon bounded, Lit by the silver flash of restless rills.

But you, ye forests, filled me most with craving! The pang I felt still to my memory cleaves, When I beheld your endless tree-tops waving, As underneath the wind the ocean heaves!

And at your wafted murmuring, I, to capture Your reachless vast, my arms would open dart, Crying in sudden, overpowering rapture: "The world is less immense than my own heart!..."

Do not accuse of pride, O Nature! Mother! My fleeting youth. Not vain was my unrest: Of all thy mortal sons there is no other Hath strained himself more fondly to thy breast.

The summer sun has scorched my skin, and daring Has chiselled on my face its stubborn force; In foaming floods I bathed, my body baring; And on the mountains braved the tempests hoarse.

All manly pleasures that our being fashion In the rough shock of elements uncouth, All of them I have known with headlong passion; With lust of struggle pulsed my arduous youth.

Intoxicating was the zest that thrilled me. What matter if I let the fervour seize My quivering soul? The bitter joy that filled me Whipped and exalted me, and left no lees.

For I had dreamt all phases of existence! All that was frail and pent in me with scorn I cast aside, and looked towards the distance Where dawned the fate for which my mind was born.

Was it a vain dream? O you centaurs smiting With roving hoofs your rocks and herbless sods, O you whose shape, a man's and beast's uniting, Shelters a secret fire that makes you gods!

You who quaffed life with its abundance drunken! Your transports I have known in olden days, In evenings when, like you in silence sunken, I drove along the darkened forest ways!

In me, ye savage gods, your strength was seething; And, when a sacred madness through me ran, In the pent breath the foliage was breathing I deemed me one of you, I mortal man.

EMILE VERHAEREN.

1855--.

THE OLD MASTERS.

In smoky inns whose loft is reached by ladders, And with a grimy ceiling splashed by shocks Of hanging hams, black-puddings, onions, bladders, Rosaries of stuffed game, capons, geese, and cocks Around a groaning table sit the gluttons Before the bleeding viands stuck with forks, Already loosening their waistcoat buttons, With wet mouths when from flagons leap the cork Teniers, and Brackenburgh, and Brauwer, shaken With listening to Jan Steen's uproarious wit, Holding their bellies dithering with bacon, Wiping their chins, watching the hissing spit. Their heavy-bodied Hebes, with their curving Bosoms in linen white without a stain, Are going round, and in long jets are serving Wine that a sunbeam filters through the pane, Before it sets on fire the kettles' paunches The Queens of Tippling are these women, whom Their swearing lovers, greedy of their haunches, Belabour as befits their youth in bloom, With sweating temples, blazing eyes, and lolling Tongue that keeps singing songs obscenely gay, With brandished fists, bodies together rolling, Blows fit to bruise their carcases, while they, With mouth for songs aye ready, throat for bumpers, And blood for ever level with their skins, Dance fit to split the floor, they are such jumpers, And butt their dancer as around he spins, And lick his face in kisses endless seeming, Then fall with ransacked corsage, wet with heat. A smell of bacon fat is richly steaming From the huge platters charged with juicy meat; The roasts are passed around, in gravy swimming, Under the noses of the guests, and passed Around again, with fresh relays of trimming. And in the kitchen drudges wash up fast The platters to be sent back to the table; The dressers bulge, crowded with crockery; The cellars hold as much as they are able; And round the estrade where this agape In glowing red, from pegs hang baskets, ladles, Strainers, and saucepans, candlesticks, and flasks. Two monkeys in a corner show their navels, Throning, with glass in hand, on two twin casks; A mellow light on every angle glimmers, Shines on the door-knob, through the great keyhole, Clings to a pestle, filters through the skimmers, Is jewelled on the monster gala bowl, And slanting on the heated hearthstone sickens, Where, o'er the embers, turns to brown the flesh Of rosy sucking-pigs and fat cock-chickens, That whet the edge of appetite afresh. From dawn to eve, from eve to dawn, and after, The masters with their women revel hold-- Women who play a farce of opulent laughter: Farce cynical, obscene, with sleeves uprolled, In corsage ript a flowering gorge not hiding, Belly that shakes with jollity, bright eyes. Noises of orgy and of rut are gliding, Rumbling, and hissing, till they end in cries; A noise of jammed iron and of vessels banging; Brauwer and Steen tilt baskets on their crowns; Brackenburgh is two lids together clanging; Others with pokers fiddle gridirons, clowns Are all of them, eager to show their mettle; They dance round those who lie with feet in air; They scrape the frying-pan, they scrape the kettle; And the eldest are the steadiest gluttons there, Keenest in kisses, and the last to tumble; With greasy nose they lick the casseroles; One of them makes a rusty fiddle grumble, Whose bow exhausts itself in cabrioles; Some are in corners vomiting, and others Are snoring with their arms hung round their seats Babies are bawling for their sweating mothers To stuff their little mouths with monster teats. Men, women, children, all stuffed full to bursting; Appetites ravening, and instincts rife, Furies of stomach, and of throats athirsting, Debauchery, explosion of rich life, In which these master gluttons, never sated, Too genuine for insipidities, Pitching their easels lustily, created Between two drinking-bouts a masterpiece.

THE COWHERD.

In neckerchief and slackened apron goes The girl to graze the cows at dawn's first peep; Under the willow shade herself she throws To finish out her sleep.

Soon as she sinks she snores; around her brow And naked toes the seeded grasses rise; Her bulging arms are folded anyhow, And round them buzz the flies.

The insects that all heated places love Come flitting o'er the grass to bask in swarms Upon the mossy patch she lies above, And by her sprawling warms.

Sometimes her arm, with awkward empty sweep, Startles around her limbs the gratified Murmur of bees; but, greedy still of sleep, She turns to the other side.

The heavy, fleshy flowers the cattle browse Frame in the sleeping woman as she dreams; She has the heavy slowness of her cows, Her eye with their peace gleams.

Strength, that the trunk of oaks with knots embosses, Shines, as the sap does, in her; and her hair Is browner than barley in the fields that tosses, Or the sand in the pathways there.

Her hands are raw, and red, and chapped; the blood That through her tanned limbs rolls its waves of heat, Lashes her throat, and lifts her breasts, as would The wind lift bending wheat.

Noon with a kiss of gold her rest surprises, Low willow branches o'er her shoulders lean, And blend, while heavier slumber in her eyes is, With her brown hair their green.

THE ART OF THE FLEMINGS.

I.

Art of the Flemings, thou didst know them, thou, Who well didst love them, wenches big of bone, With ruddy teats, and bodies like flowers blown; Thy proudest masterpieces tell us how.

Whether a goddess glimmers from thy painting, Or nymphs with dripping hair a shepherd sees Rising among the lonely irides, Or sailors to the sirens' kisses fainting,

Or females with full contours symbolizing The seasons beautiful, O glorious Art, These are the Masteries love-born in thy heart, The wenches of thy colours' gormandizing.

And to create their bodies' carnal splendour, Naked, and fat, and unashamed, thy brush Under their clear and glossy skin made blush A fire of unimagined colours tender.

They were a focussed light that flashed and glinted; Their eyes were kindled at the stars, and on Thy canvases their bosoms rose and shone, Like great bouquets of flesh all rosy-tinted.

Sweating with love they rolled about a clearing 'Mid in the wood, or bathed their feet in springs, While in the thickets full of noise of wings, Satyrs were prowling and through branches leering,

And hid their legs, salacious, shagged, distorted; Their eyes, like sparks holing the darkness, lit Some leafy corner, their long mouths were slit With greasy smiles, their lustful nostrils snorted,

Till, dogs in rut, they leapt to their bitches; these Feign flight, and shiver coldly, blushing roses, Pushing the satyr off the part that closes, Squeezing their thighs together under his knees.

And some, by madness more than his ignited, Rounding their naked haunches, and rich flesh Of glorious croups beneath a showering mesh Of golden hair, to wild assaults invited.

II.

You with the life with which yourselves abounded Conceived them, masters dear to fame, with red Brutalities of blood upon them shed, The bodies of your beauties richly rounded.

No pallid women sunk in listless poses Morosely on your canvases are seen, As the moon's face shimmers in waters green, Mirroring their phthisis and chlorosis,

With foreheads sad as is the day's declining, Sad as a dolorous music faints and dies, With heavy-lidded, sick and glassy eyes, In which consumption and despair are pining,

And false, affected grace of bodies faded Upon the sofas where their time they pass, In scented dressing-gowns of taffetas, And in chemises with a dear lace braided.

Nothing your brushes knew of painted faces, Nor of indecency, nor of the nice Hints of a cunning and perverted vice Which with its winking eye our art debases,

Nor of the pedlar Venuses whose draping Of curtains of the cushioned chamber hints, Nor corners of a venal flesh that glints In nests out of the low-necked dress escaping,

Pricking, suggestive themes you knew not, faintings Of shepherdesses in false pastorals, No, nor voluptuous beds in hollow walls-- The pulsing women, masters, of your paintings,

In landscapes bright, or waited on by pages Crimsonly clad in panelled halls with gold, Or in the purple sumptuousness unrolled Of the god-guarded, mellow classic ages,

Your women sweated health; they were serenely Crimson with blood, and white with corpulence; Ruts they did hold in leashed obedience, And led them at their heels with gesture queenly.

PEASANTS.

Not Greuze's ploughmen made insipid in The melting colours of his pastorals, So neatly dressed, so rosy, that one laughs To see the sugared idyll chastening The pastels of a Louis Quinze salon, But dirty, gross, and bestial--as they are.

Penned round some market town in villages, They know not them who traffic in the next, But hold them enemies to cheat and rogue. Their fatherland? Not one believes in it, Except that it makes soldiers of their sons, To steal their labour for a span of years. What is the fatherland to yokels? They See only, in a corner of their brains, Vaguely, the king, magnificent man of gold, In the braided velvet of his purple robes, A sceptre, and gemmed crowns escutcheoning The panelled walls of gilded palaces, Guarded by sentinels with tasselled swords. This do they know of power. It is enough. And for the rest their heavy feet would march In clogs through duty, liberty, and law. In everything by instinct ankylosed, A dirty almanac is all they read; And though they hear the distant cities roaring, So terrified are they by revolutions, That they are riveted to serfdom's chains, Fearing, if they should rear, the iron heel.

Along the black roads hollowed out with ruts, Dung-heaps in front and cinder-heaps behind, Stretch with low roofs and naked walls their huts Under the buffeting wind and lashing rain. These are their farms. And yonder soars the church, Stained, to the north, with ooze of verdigris, And farther, squared with ditches, lie their fields, Fertile in patches, thanks to fat manure, And to the harrow's unrelenting teeth. There they keep tilling with their obstinate hands The black glebe mined by moles, and rotten with Detritus, pregnant with the autumn's sperm. With dripping brow they drive the spade in deep, Doubled above the furrows they must sow, Under the hail of March that whips their back. And in the summer, when the ripe rye rocks With golden glints under the pouring sun, Here, in the fire of long and torrid days, Their restless sickle shaves the vast wheat-field, While from their wrinkled foreheads runs the sweat, Opening their skin from shoulders down to hips; Noon darts its brazier rays upon their heads; So raw the heat is that in meslin fields The too dry ears burst open, and the beasts, Their necks with gadflies riddled, pant in the sun. And let November slow to die arrive, Rolling his hectic rattle through deaf woods, Howling his sobs and ending not his moans, Until his death-knell sounds--still runs their sweat. Always anew preparing future crops, Under a sky spouting from swollen clouds, While the north wind tears big holes in the woods, And sweeps the broken stubble from the fields, So that their bodies soon in ruin fall: Let them be young and comely, broadly built, Winter that chills, summer that calcines them, Makes their limbs loathsome and their lungs short-breathed; Or old, and bearing the down-weighing years, With blear eyes, broken backs, and useless arms, And horror stamped upon their hedgehog face, They stagger under the ruin-loving wind. And when Death opens unto them its doors; Their coffin sliding into the soft earth Seems only to contain a thing twice dead.

II.

On evenings when through eddying skies the wind Is whirling the swarming snow across the fields, Grey-headed farmers sit in reckonings lost, Near lamps from which a thread of smoke ascends. The kitchen is unkempt and slatternly: A string of dirty children by the stove Gorge the spilt remnants of the evening meal; Mangy and bony cats lick dishes clean; Cocks make their beaks ring upon pewter plates; Damp soaks the leprous walls; and on the hearth Four flickering logs are twisting meagre shanks Dying with listless tongues of pale red ray; The old men's heads are full of bitter thoughts. "For all the seasons unremitting toil, With all hands at the plough a hundred years, The farm has passed from father on to son, And, with good years and bad, remains the same, Jogging along upon the brink of ruin." This is what gnaws and bites them with slow tooth. So like an ulcer hate is in their hearts, Patient and cunning hate with smiling face. Their frank and loud good nature hatches rage; Wickedness glimmers in their icy looks; They stink of the rancorous gall that, age by age, Their sufferings have collected in their souls. Keen are they on the slightest gain, and mean; Since they can not enrich themselves by work, Stinginess makes their hearts hard, their hearts fetid; And black their mind is, set on petty things, And stupid and confounded before great; As they had never raised their eyes unto The sun, and seen magnificent sunsets Spread on the evening, like a crimson lake.

III.