Part 4

All the birds have fled our monotonous plains, and pallid fogs float over the marshes. O those two cries: autumn, winter! winter, autumn! Do you hear the dead wood falling in the forest?

No more is our garden the husband of light, whence the phlox were seen springing towards their glory; our fiery gladioli are mingled with the earth, and have lain down in their length to die.

Everything is nerveless and void of beauty; everything is flameless and passes and flees and bends and sinks down unsupported. Oh! give me your eyes lit up by your soul that I may seek in them in spite of all a corner of the old sky.

In them alone our light lives still, the light that covered all the garden long ago, when it exulted with the white pride of our lilies and the climbing ardour of our hollyhocks.

XIII

When the fine snow with its sparkling grains silts over our threshold, I hear your footsteps wander and stop in the neighbouring room.

You withdraw the bright and fragile mirror from its place by the window, and your bunch of keys dances along the drawer of the beech-wood wardrobe.

I listen, and you are poking the fire and arousing the embers; and you are arranging about the silent walls the silence of the chairs.

You remove the fleeting dust from the workbasket with the narrow feet, and your ring strikes and resounds on the quivering sides of a wine-glass.

And I am more happy than ever this evening at your tender presence, and at feeling you near and not seeing you and ever hearing you.

XIV

If fate has saved us from commonplace errors and from vile untruth and from sorry shams, it is because all constraint that might have bowed our double fervour revolted us.

You went your way, free and frank and bright, mingling with the flowers of love the flowers of your will, and gently lifting up towards yourself its lofty spirit when my brow was bent towards fear or doubt.

And you were always kind and artless in your acts, knowing that my heart was for ever yours; for if I loved--do I now know?--some other woman, it is to your heart that I always returned.

Your eyes were then so pure in their tears that my being was stirred to sincerity and truth; and I repeated to you holy and gentle words, and your weapons were sadness and forgiveness.

And in the evening I lulled my head to sleep on your bright bosom, happy at having returned from false and dim distances to the fragrant spring that bore sway in us, and I remained a captive in your open arms.

XV

No, my heart has never tired of you.

In the time of June, long ago, you said to me: "If I knew, friend, if I knew that my presence one day might be a burden to you-- with my poor heart and sorrowful thoughts, I would go away, no matter where."

And gently your forehead rose towards my kiss.

And you said to me again: "Bonds loosen always and life is so full, and what matters if the chain is golden that ties to the same ring in port our two human barks!"

And gently your tears revealed to me your grief.

And you said and you said again: "Let us separate, let us separate before the evil days; our life has been too lofty to drag it trivially from fault to fault."

And you fled and you fled, and my two hands desperately held you back.

No, my heart has never tired of you.

XVI

How happy we are still and proud of living when the least ray of sunshine glimpsed in the heavens lights up for a moment the poor flowers of rime that the hard and delicate frost engraved on our window-panes.

Rapture leaps in us and hope carries us away, and our old garden appears to us again, in spite of its long paths strewn with dead branches, living and pure and bright and full of golden gleams.

Something shining and undaunted, I know not what, creeps into our blood; and in the quick kisses that, ardently, frantically, we give each other, we re-embody the immensity and fulness of summer.

XVII

Shall we suffer, alas! the dead weight of the years until at length we are no more than two quiet people, exchanging the harmless kisses of children at evening when the fire flames in the hollow of the chimney?

Shall our dear furniture see us drag ourselves with slow steps from the hearth to the beechen chest, support ourselves by the wall to reach the window, and huddle our tottering bodies on heavy seats?

If our wreck is to appear one day in such guise, while numbness deadens our brains and our arms, we shall not bemoan, in spite of evil fate, and we shall hold our tears pent up in our breasts.

For even so, we shall still keep our eyes with which to gaze on the day that follows night, and to see the dawn and the sun shed their radiance on life, and make a wonderful object of the earth.

XVIII

The small happenings, the thousand nothings, a letter, a date, a humble anniversary, a word said once again as in days long ago uplift your heart and mine in these long evenings.

And we celebrate for ourselves these simple things, and we count and recount our old treasures, so that the little of us that we still keep may remain steadfast and brave before the sullen hour.

And more than is fitting, we show ourselves solicitous of these poor, gentle, kindly joys that sit down on the bench near the flaming fire with winter flowers on their thin knees.

And they take from the chest where their goodness hides it the bright bread of happiness that was allotted to us, and of which Love in our house has so long eaten that he loves it even to the crumbs.

XIX

Come even to our threshold, scattering your white ash, O peaceful, slowly falling snow: the lime-tree in the garden holds all its branches bowed, and the light calandra dissolves in the sky no longer.

O snow, who warm and protect the barely rising corn with the moss and wool that you spread from plain to plain! Silent snow, the gentle friend of the houses asleep in the calm of morning:

Cover our roof and lightly touch our windows, and suddenly enter by the door over the threshold with your pure flakes and your dancing flames,

O snow, luminous through our soul, snow, who also warm our last dreams like the rising corn!

XX

When our bright garden was gay with all its flowers, the regret at having shrunk our hearts sprang from our lips in moments of passion; and forgiveness, offered but deserved always, and the exaggerated display of our wretchedness and so many tears moistening our sad, sincere eyes uplifted our love.

But in these months of heavy rain, when everything huddles together and makes itself small, when brightness itself tires of thrusting back shadow and night, our soul is no longer vibrant and strong enough to confess our faults with rapture.

We tell them in slow speech; in truth, with affection still, but at the fall of the evening and no longer at dawn; sometimes even we count them on our ten fingers like things that we number and arrange in the house, and to lessen their folly or their number we debate them.

XXI

With my old hands lifted to your forehead, during your brief sleep by the black hearth this evening, I part your hair, and I kiss the fervour of your eyes hidden beneath your long lashes.

Oh! the sweet affection of this day's end! My eyes follow the years that have completed their course, and suddenly your life appears so perfect in them that my love is moved by a touching respect.

And as in the time when you were my betrothed, the desire comes back to me again in all its ardour to fall on my knees, and with fingers as chaste as my thoughts to touch the place where your gentle heart beats.

XXII

If our hearts have burned in uplifting days with a love as bright as it was lofty, age now makes us slack and indulgent and mild before our faults.

You no longer make us greater, O youthful will, with your unsubdued ardour, and our life is coloured now with gentle calm and pale kindliness.

We are at the setting of your sun, love, and we mask our weakness with the common-place words and poor speeches of an empty, tardy wisdom.

Oh! how sad and shameful would the future be for us if from our winter and our mistiness there did not break out like a torch the memory of the high-spirited souls we once were.

XXIII

In this rugged winter when the floating sun founders on the horizon like a heavy wreck, I love to say your name, with its slow, solemn tone, as the clock echoes with the deep strokes of time.

And the more I say it, the more ravished is my voice, so much so that from my lips it descends into my heart and awakens in me a more glowing happiness than the sweetest words I have spoken in my life.

And before the new dawn or the evening falling to sleep, I repeat it with my voice that is ever the same, but oh! with what strength and supreme ardour shall I pronounce it at the hour of death!

XXIV

Perhaps, when my last day comes, perhaps, if only for a moment, a frail and quavering sun will stoop down at my window.

My hands then, my poor faded hands, will even so be gilded once again by his glory; he will touch my mouth and my forehead a last time with his slow, bright, deep kiss; and the pale, but still proud flowers of my eyes will return his light before they close.

Sun, have I not worshipped your strength and your brightness! My torrid, gentle art, in its supreme achievement has held you captive in the heart of my poems; like a field of ripe wheat that surges in the summer wind, this page and that of my books confers life on you and exhalts you:

O Sun, who bring forth and deliver, O immense friend of whom our pride has need, be it that at the new, solemn and imperious hour when my old human heart will be heavy under the proof, you will come once more to visit it and witness.

XXV

Oh! how gentle are your hands and their slow caress winding about my neck and gliding over my body, when I tell you at the fall of evening how my strength grows heavy day by day with the lead of my weakness!

You do not wish me to become a shadow and a wreck like those who go towards the darkness, even though they carry a laurel in their mournful hands and fame sleeping in their hollow chest.

Oh! how you soften the law of time for me, and how comforting and generous to me is your dream; for the first time, with an untruth you lull my heart, that forgives you and thanks you for it,

Well knowing, nevertheless, that all ardour is vain against all that is and all that must be, and that, by finishing in your eyes my fine human life, may perhaps be found a deep happiness.

XXVI

When you have closed my eyes to the light, kiss them with a long kiss, for they will have given you in the last look of their last fervour the utmost passionate love.

Beneath the still radiance of the funeral torch, bend down towards the farewell in them your sad and beautiful face, so that the only image they will keep in the tomb may be imprinted on them and may endure.

And let me feel, before the coffin is nailed up, our hands meet once again on the pure, white bed, and your cheek rest one last time against my forehead on the pale cushions.

And let me afterwards go far away with my heart, which will preserve so fiery a love for you that the other dead will feel its glow even through the compact, dead earth!