Paul Verlaine Poetry

Before Your Light Quite Fail

Before your light quite fail,
Already paling star,
(The quail Sings in the thyme afar!)
Turn on the poet?s eyes
That love makes overrun?
(See rise The lark to meet the sun!)
Your glance, that presently
Must drown in the blue morn;
(What glee Amid the rustling corn!)
Then flash my message true
Down yonder,?far away!?
(The dew Lies sparkling on the hay.)
Across what visions seek
The Dear One slumbering still.
(Quick, quick! The sun has reached the hill!)
-- Translated by Gertrude Hall

Autumn Song
With long sobs the violin-throbs
of autumn wound
my heart with languorous and montonous sound.
Choking and pale When i mind the tale
the hours keep,
my memory strays down
other days and I weep;
and I let me go where ill winds blow
now here, now there,
harried and sped, even as a dead
leaf, anywhere.

"Covering the land..."

Covering the land?
Dismal, endless plain?
Blurring the terrain,
Snow haze gleams like sand.
Bronze the sky, with no Glimmering of light:
Is the moon to grow Dim, and die tonight?
In the woods, close by,
Billows the fog, cloaks
Gray the cloud-like oaks
Floating on the sky. Bronze the sky,
with no Glimmering of light:
Is the moon to grow Dim,
and die tonight?
Scrawny wolves, and you,
Wheezing ravens, when
Winds blow sharp, what then?
What? What can you do?
Covering the land?
Dismal, endless plain?
Blurring the terrain,
Snow haze gleams like sand.
--Translated by Norman R. Shapiro

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 their fantastic disguises.
While they sing in a minor key
of all-conquering love and careless fortune,
they don?t seem to trust in 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.

The Sea-Shells

Each shell, encrusted, we see,
in the cave where we achieved love?s goal,
has its own peculiarity.
One has the purple colour of souls,
ours, thief of the blood our heart?s possess
when I burn, and you flame like hot coals.
That one affects your languorousness,
your pallor, your weary form
angered by my mocking eyes? caress:
this one mimics the charm of your ear,
and this I see your rosy neck,
so full and warm:
but one, among all of them, troubled me.

Related Posts by Categories

Widget by Simran