Part 8 (1/2)

1842

So proud your port, your arm so powerful, With such a grip you grip the G.o.ddess' hair, That one might take you, from your casual air, For a young ruffian flinging down his trull.

Your clear eye flas.h.i.+ng with precocity, You have displayed yourself proud architect Of fabrics so audaciously correct That we may guess what your ripe prime will be.

Poet, our blood ebbs out through every pore; Is it, perchance, the robe the Centaur bore, Which made a sullen streamlet of each vein,

Was three times dipped within the venom fell Of those old reptiles fierce and terrible Whom, in his cradle, Hercules had slain?

MUSIC

Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea, Bears me towards my pale Star: in clear s.p.a.ce, or 'neath a vaporous canopy On-floating, I set sail.

With heaving chest which strains forward, and lungs outblown, I climb the ridged steeps Of those high-piled clouds which 'thwart the night are thrown, Veiling its starry deeps.

I suffer all the throes, within my quivering form, Of a great s.h.i.+p in pain, Now a soft wind, and now the writhings of a storm

Upon the vasty main Rock me: at other times a death-like calm, the bare Mirror of my despair.

THE CATS

The lover and the stern philosopher Both love, in their ripe time, the confident Soft cats, the house's chiefest ornament, Who like themselves are cold and seldom stir.

Of knowledge and of pleasure amorous, Silence they seek and Darkness' fell domain; Had not their proud souls scorned to brook his rein, They would have made grim steeds for Erebus.

Pensive they rest in n.o.ble att.i.tudes Like great stretched sphinxes in vast solitudes Which seem to sleep wrapt in an endless dream;

Their fruitful loins are full of sparks divine, And gleams of gold within their pupils s.h.i.+ne As 'twere within the shadow of a stream.

THE SADNESS OF THE MOON

This evening the Moon dreams more languidly, Like a beauty who on mounded cus.h.i.+ons rests, And with her light hand fondles lingeringly, Before she sleeps, the slope of her sweet b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

On her soft satined avalanches' height Dying, she laps herself for hours and hours In long, long swoons, and gazes at the white Visions which rise athwart the blue like flowers.

When sometimes in her perfect indolence She lets a furtive tear steal gently thence, Some pious poet, a lone, sleepless one,

Takes in his hollowed hand this gem, shot through, Like an opal stone, with gleams of every hue, And in his heart's depths hides it from the sun.

MOESTA ET ERRABUNDA