An Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets PDF

An Anthology of
Belgian Symbolist Poets
Donald Flanell Friedman

Editor
PETER LANG
An Anthology
of Belgian Symbolist Poets
Belgian Francophone Library

General Editor
Vol. 15
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
An Anthology
of Belgian Symbolist Poets
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
An anthology of Belgian symbolist poets /
edited by Donald Flanell Friedman.
p. cm. (Belgian francophone library ; v. 15)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Belgian poetry (French)20th century. 2. Belgian poetry (French)19th century.
3. Symbolism (Literary movement)Belgium. I. Friedman, Donald Flanell. II. Series.
PQ3843 .A55 2003 841.80915dc21 2002011036
ISBN 0-8204-5594-6
ISSN 1074-6757
DIE DEUTSCHE BIBLIOTHEK-CIP-EINHEITSAUFNAHME

Friedman, Donald Flanell:
An anthology of Belgian symbolist poets /
edited and translated by Donald Flannell Friedman.
New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Bern;
Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Brussels; Vienna; Oxford: Lang.
(Belgian Francophone library; Vol. 15)
ISBN 0-8204-5594-6
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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Printed in Germany
For my mother and father
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NOTE TO THE RE-EDITION
It is with pleasure that I again offer this selection of Belgian Symbolist

poetry, rst published in the Garland World Literature in Translation se-
ries in 1992. I remain struck by the visionary immediacy of the Belgian
verse achieved in a remarkable eforescence a century ago. The pleasure is height-
ened by the fact that the poems will appear in the Belgian Francophone Library.
My resounding thanks to the many authors in Europe and the U.S. who have
made this a vibrant series. At the Belgian Ministry of Culture, I would like to ex-
press gratitude to Marc Quaghebeur with whom I conceived the series, and appre-
ciation to Jean-Luc Outers, who has unfailingly nurtured and supported the series
since its inception. They have made this a fruitful collaborative venture.
This Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets was originally inspired by the work of
Anna Balakian, whom I am proud to claim as mentor. The example of this great
scholar remains luminous. She combined intellectual penetration, absolute open-
ness to the essence of poetry, and the ability to live life with intense commitment.
I would like to express appreciation to the Spanish poet, Francesc Miguel Franch,
who generously shared his expertise and poetic insight during the translation
process.
I am fortunate to enjoy the friendship of scholars of the Belgian n de sicle,
Jane Block, Adrienne Fontainas, Steven Goddard, and Patrick Laude. I am grate-
ful for their profound work and warm rapport. My path has been lit by the crea-
tion of Paul Williams and by Elza Willems understanding and sustaining friend-
ship. With gratitude, I honor the memory of scholar, Luc Fontainas, who, with
characteristic kindness, introduced me to poets included in this anthology.
I would like to express warm appreciation to Dr. Madeleine Jacobs for her radi-
ant wisdom and guidance.
viii an anthology of belgian symbolist poets
The encouragement of my mother and father, their sensitivity to all manifesta-

tions of beauty, made this work possible. Friederike Zeitlhofer is ever an inspiring
and joyous presence, a source of hope in my world.
Winthrop University
February, 2002
CONTENTS
Belgian Symbolism: A Poetry of Place and Displacement 1
I. GEORGES RODENBACH
Commentary 6
The indolent mists of autumn . . . 8

Le brouillard indolent de lautomne . . . 9
Deceased are the patrician mansions . . . 8
Trs dfuntes sont les maisons . . . 9
The ancient church hovers . . . 12
La vieille glise rve . . . 13
My city, beloved sister . . . 14
O ville, toi ma soeur . . . 15
The chamber, sad and weary . . . 14
La chambre triste et lasse . . . 15
Silence: it is the voice which trails . . . 16
Silence: cest la voix qui se trane . . . 17
At rst, the aquarium seems not to be alive . . . 16
Laquarium dabord ne semble pas vivant . . . 17
The long line of streetlamps . . . 18
Les rverbres en enlade . . . 19
The Night is alone, like a beggar . . . 20
La Nuit est seule, comme un pauvre . . . 21
Sweet is the room . . . 22
la chambre, un doux port relgu. . . 23
During those hours of sad evening . . . 22
Aux heures de soir morne . . . 23
x an anthology of belgian symbolist poets
At evening, they appear . . . 24

Aux vitres de notre me . . . 25
Water, for the sufferer . . . 26
LEau, pour qui souffre . . . 27
O snow, the sweet sound . . . 26
O neige, toi la douce endormeuse . . . 27
II.EMILE VERHAEREN
Commentary 32
The Corpse 34
La Morte 35
The Revolt 36
La Rvolte 37
The Blade 38
Le Glaive 39
The Ill 40
Les Malades 41
The Rain 44
La Pluie 45
Innitely 48
Inniment 49
Fatal Flower 48
Fleur Fatale 49
To Die 50
Mourir 51
London 52
Londres 53
Madmans Song 52
Chanson de Fou 53
Tenebrae 56
Tnbres 57
Vesperal 56
Un Soir 57
The Rock 58
Le Roc 59
The Abandoned Port 62
Le Port Dchu 63
Contents xi
I I I . M AU R I C E M A ET E R LI N C K
Commentary 68
Hot House 70
Serre Chaude 71
Nocturnal Orison 70
Oraison Nocturne 71
Foliage of the Heart 72
Feuillage du Coeur 73
Soul 74
Ame 75
Prayer 76
Oraison 77
Reections 78
Reets 79
Diving Bell 80
Cloche Plongeur 81
Round of Tedium 82
Ronde dEnnui 83
Touches 84
Attouchements 85
Bell-Glasses 88
Cloches De Verre 89
Weary Hunts 90
Chasses Lasses 91
Gazes 90
Regards 91
Amen 94
Amen 95
Hospital 94
Hpital 95
Hothouse of Boredom 98
Serre dEnnui 99
Afternoon 98
Aprs-midi 99
Soul of Night 100
Ame de Nuit 101
And if he were ever to return 100
Et sil revenait un jour 101
xii an anthology of belgian symbolist poets
They killed three sweet little girls 102

Ils ont tu trois petites lles 103
You have lit the lamps 104
Vous avez allum les lampes 105
Canticle of the Virgin 104
Cantique de la Vierge 105
I have searched thirty years 106
Jai cherch trente ans, mes soeurs 107
I V. T H E Y O U N G B E L G I A N S
Commentary 110
M AX WA L L E R
Its Raining 112
Il Pleut 113
Love-Hotel 112
Amour-Htel 113
A L B E RT G I RAU D
Red Mass 118
Messe Rouge 119
Waltz of Chopin 118
Valse de Chopin 119
Initiation 120
Initiation 121
The Missal 120
Le Missel 121
VA L R E G I L L E
The Slumbers of Gold 126
Les Sommeils DOr 127
Legend 126
Lgende 127
Contents xiii
I WA N G I L K I N
Litanies and Prayer 132
Litanies et Prire 133
Prayer 136
Prire 137
Psychology 138
Psychologie 139
GEORGES KHNOPFF
A EveningLife: Serenity 142
SoirLa Vie: Srnit 143
J E A N D E LV I L L E
Magica 146
Magica 147
The Holy Book 150
Le Livre Sacr 151
Lunar Park 150
Parc Lunaire 151
The Horror of the Rain 152
LHorreur de la Pluie 153
The Marmorean Slumbers 152
Les Sommeils de Marbre 153
GEORGES MARLOW
At Evening I 158
Du Soir 159
FERNAND SEVERIN
She, Who Will Come 162
A Celle qui Viendra 163
xiv an anthology of belgian symbolist poets
GREGOIRE LE ROY
Wretchedness 166
Misre 167
The Fiance of Shadows 166
La Fiance de lOmbre 167
Dimmed Christmases 168
Les Nols teints 169
A L B E RT M O C K E L
Carmen 172
Carmen 173
To the Destroyer 172
A La Faucheuse 173
Intoxication 174
Enivrement 175
The Prey 176
La Proie 177
MARCEL WYSEUR
The Spinners 180
Les Fileuses 181
The Chapel in the Dunes 180
La Chapelle dans Les Dunes 181
A N D R F O N TA I NAS
Jealousy 186
Jalousie 187
The Virgins Look at Themselves in the Mirrors 186
Les Vierges se Mirent dans les Miroirs 187
The Estuaries of Shadows VI 188
Les Estuaires de lOmbre VI 189
The Estuaries of Shadows VIII 190
Les Estuaires de lOmbre VIII 191
Your Eyes 190
Tes Yeux 191
Contents xv
V. M A X E L S K A M P
Commentary 194
In Memorium 196
In Memoriam 197
Song of the Rue Saint-Paul no. 7 200
La Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul no. 7 201
Blue Night 202
Nuit Bleue 203
Silks 206
Soieries 207
The Islands 208
Les Iles 209
Salome 210
Salome 211
V I . C H A R L ES VA N L E R B E RG H E
Commentary 216
Gaze into our depths . . . 218

Regarde au fond de nous . . . 219
Place your pale diadem . . . 218
Mets sur mon front . . . 219
My resonant angels came . . . 220
Dentre les roses de laurore . . . 221
Do you still remember . . . 222
Le sais-tu encore, O ma Licorne? 223
But one night Venus came . . . 222
Or, Venus, une nuit . . . 223
Close now, magic ring . . . 226
Ferme-toi, cercle enchant. . . 227
The wave is shivering . . . 230
Londe tremble . . . 231
The radiant fruit of gold shimmers . . . 230
Il luit dans lombre, le beau fruit . . . 231
xvi an anthology of belgian symbolist poets
Be absolved by my decree . . . 232

Sois absous par ma bouche . . . 233
Dove! Dove! Enchanted Dove . . . 234
Colombe! Colombe! Colombe enchante . . . 235
But how to understand and how to name you . . . 234
Mais comment vous comprendre . . . 235
I crossed the ardent forest . . . 236
Jai travers lardent buisson . . . 237
O God, who could be there . . . 240
O Dieu qui donc est l. . . 241
Through the happiness of twilight . . . 240
Ce soir, travers le bonheur . . . 241
Along the pale waters . . . 242
Au long des eaux ples . . . 243
I say, teach me who you are, Azrael . . . 244
Apprends-moi, dis-je, qui tu es . . . 245
O death, dust of stars . . . 244
O mort, poussire dtoiles . . . 245
ILLUSTRATIONS
cover: Fernand Khnopff. A Gesture of Offering, 1900, drypoint,

Spenser Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas.
Fernand Khnopff. An Abandoned City. 1904. Royal Museum, Brussels.

(photograph courtesy Speltdoorn, Brussels). 10
Fernand Khnopff. At Bruges. A Church Portal. 1904. Royal Museum,
Brussels. (photograph courtesy Speltdoorn, Brussels). 11
Fernand Khnopff. Secret-Reection. 1902. The Groeninge Museum,
Bruges. (photograph courtesy Speltdoorn, Brussels). 79
Jean Delville. Expectation, 1903. pencil and charcoal on paper,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo The Museum
of Modern Art. 149
BELGIAN SYMBOLISM: A POETR Y OF
PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT
Belgian Symbolism participates in the essence of the international move-

ment, which originated in France and swept Europe at the turn of the
century. In its broadest denition, Symbolism is a style and a mystique
unconcerned with mimetic representation of objects and events in their historical
reality, but with evocation and distillation of mood. The thrust of the movement
was to suggest, in indirect discourse, the secrets of interiority, thereby creating an
enduring zone of aesthetic experience distanced from the mundane concerns and
materialism of society. The elusive and evanescent, the disappearance of the lyric
self, masked by the personae of myth and legend, such is the general aura of Sym-
bolism. Within this aura, Belgian Symbolism has its own particular nuance and
characteristics which encompass the highly varied and individualistic creation of
many young writersbeginning in the 1880s, with prolongations lasting through
the 1920swho found artistic renewal in giving expression to the mysterious and
uncharted depths of interiority.
In the January, 1894 Le Reveil, Victor Remouchamps wrote of the Interior
World: We have everything within us. The mind is an ocean of sensations, a uni-
verse of visions; but it is necessary to know how to explore it . . .1 Paradoxically,
the key to this exploration was vouchsafed the Belgian Symbolists by means of
highly concrete imagery, culled from the exterior world, which became a transpar-
ent screen and mirror allowing access to inner states. Emile Verhaeren summarized
the essential modality and distinction of Belgian Symbolism in an 1887 article in
LArt Moderne: One begins with things seen, heard, felt, tasted in order to give
rise to evocation. . . .2 Concrete imagery may dilate, expand in meaning to en-
compass abstract states of mind. In his well-known response to an inquiry by Jules
Huret, Mallarm had distinguished two types of symbolic usage, either to gradu-
ally evoke an object in order to demonstrate a mood or, conversely, to start with an
object and, through deciphering, disengage a mood from it.3 The second usage
2 an anthology of belgian symbolist poets
typies Belgian poetry of the turn of the century, in which exterior landscape
serves as the designation of the interior; the lineaments of the known may suggest
the artists hidden response to it; subjective deformation of a familiar environment
may transform it into an inner and private realm of poetic experience.
Belgian Symbolism is a poetry of strangeness and hallucination, precisely be-
cause of being rooted, much more so than the Symbolism of France, in a sense of
place. Whereas the French Symbolist coterie evoked endless articial dreamscapes,
somnolent, enchanted gardens inhabited by swans, princesses, and such (these are
also present in Belgian Symbolism, but to a lesser extent), the strongest of the Bel-
gian poets sought the dreamlike aspects of their own northern environment in
order to demonstrate the subtle, ambiguous inuence of atmosphere upon those
who absorb it. Spatial paradigms for the inner world are recurrent throughout
Belgian Symbolism and often take the form of actual cities, no longer sites of com-
munity, but the poets private realm of introspection. Bruges and Ghent, canal cit-
ies of mirroring water, are Georges Rodenbachs spaces of poetry and delving. A
black and labyrinthine London serves Emile Verhaeren as a concretization of spir-
itual dejection and madness, as do wintry planes and villages of Flanders. The port
of Antwerp is the pivot of Max Elskamps poetry. The polyglot life of the port is
conducive to dreams of distant islands outside of time. The port of Antwerp is
Elskamps entranceway to many other spaces, often to spaces within spaces, as in a
play of Chinese boxes. In number 7 of the Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul, the poets
native street leads him to a harbor brothel and, within the brothel, to two engrav-
ings, Vesuvius and the suspended Brooklyn Bridge, emblems of the re and wait-
ing which are the modalities of the place. In Salome, the space of a theater loge
and, beyond, the performance of ballerinas, merges with a fantasy of Herods for-
tress. A length of silk in Soieries gainsays entrance into a Persian garden, a world
of miniature illumination, evoked in tiny, mincing lines. Spatial paradigms are
used to suggest moods of disjunction, isolation, and suffocating disharmony in
the poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck. Hothouses, bell-glasses, diving bells, spaces of
protection and imprisonment, are models of interiority. Brief notations of aspects
of asylums, hospital wards, canal cities enter into uncanny conjunctions in
Maeterlincks world of confusion, a private theater in which nothing is in its place,
rien ny est sa place. Charles Van Lerberghe, who wrote La Chanson dEve from
a pastoral retreat in the Ardennes, evokes a series of Edens, distinct spaces, which
reect the moods of the poet-gure, Eve, who enters a state of symbiosis with the
world she is the rst to perceive, transforming it in her image. This marked pri-
macy of place and the centrality of spatial paradigms for the inner world in Belgian
Symbolism may be attributed to feelings of nascent national pride. In 1880, Bel-
gium was a fty-year-old nation state and, by 1885, Symbolism was the rst wide-
spread, multi-national literary movement in which Belgians played an active role.
Though sharing a common language with France and a common impetus to deny
the contingencies of the mundane world in their art, the Belgian writers could mit-
igate the force of French cultural imperialism and establish a Belgian presence in
the literary world, distinct from their neighbors, through cultivation of image
Belgian Symbolism: A Poetry of Place and Displacement 3
repertoires of places, objects, and Flemish or Walloon experiences, by entering

into accord with their own geography and rendering it oneiric.
As a style, Symbolism has largely become associated with hermeticism, abstrac-
tion, purposeful obfuscation which denies entrance into the poem to all but the in-
itiated. Yet, this is not the case with Belgian Symbolism. With its emphasis of con-
crete imagery and extraction of mood from the visible world, the language of
Belgian Symbolism is lucid. Simple language allows the reader to enter the sphere
of the suggestive and equivocal. Rodenbachs poems are often structured around a
central conceit, reinforced by many subsidiary metaphors. The accumulation of
sensory impressions, comparisons, and uncanny personications, rather than dif-
cult syntactical distortions, contribute to an atmosphere of uncertainty. In
Maeterlincks verse, individual lines are usually simple and direct, often pronounce-
ments of vision; it is the untoward juxtapositions of objects and uncertain links
between the lines which suffuse Maeterlincks poetry with ambiguity. Verhaeren
and Elskamp practice extreme syntactical distortion in their verse, but their innova-
tions in grammar and structure are made in the direction of simplication.
Verhaerens truncated, tortured lines, obsessive repetitions, and unfamiliar use of
adverbs perfectly convey halting thought and inner torment. Such calculations as
ellipses, absent articles, and extremely short lines of 57 syllables endow Elskamps
verse with a deceptively naive quality and emphasize individual moments of vision,
which together form a panorama of mood. In La Chanson dEve, Lerberghe orches-
trates a uid, malleable language of variable meter and often muted or absent end
rhymes intended to convey the unspoiled vision of the rst being. There is a con-
cordance between the long and respected tradition of Flemish painting, at once
mystical in orientation and based upon close observation of the world, and the vis-
ual and visionary qualities of language preponderate in Belgian Symbolism. The
fteenth century St. Ursula reliquary of Hans Memling, dream-like, yet precise in
detail, serves as a metaphor in Rodenbachs Bruges-la-Morte. Verhaeren was also
interested in the visual arts, an astute critic who wrote both about the Flemish past
and contemporary Idealist painters. Verhaerens rst collection of poetry, Les Fla-
mandes, was inspired by sixteenth century genre painting. Gregoire Le Roy and
Jean Delville were symbolist poets and painters, in quest in both media of the enig-
matic which lurks beneath appearance. As a visionary poetry, Belgian Symbolism
inuenced many artists of the turn of the century, chief among them Fernand
Khnopff and William Degouve de Nunques, who derived much of their inspira-
tion from contemporary literature. They are not, however, simply illustrators, but
sought in their work to portray objects in a manner which suggests the mystery
and ambiguity, rather than the denitude of the world. Uncommonly compressed
or expanded formats, idiosyncratic use of color, emphasis of stasis and suspended
animation are among the techniques used by Belgian painters of the turn of the
century to depict images congruent with the modality of symbolist poetry.
In this literature of northern voice, at once more oriented toward the proximate
world than French Symbolism, yet also surrounded with a frisson of unreality,
there is an idiosyncratic repertoire of gures. The gures of Greek myth are
largely absent from Belgian poetry, although the presence of Narcissus is implied,
but unnamed in Rodenbachs city of reection. Instead, Rodenbachs world is
haunted by Ophelia, suggestive of drowning entrance into an amniotic state of
undifferentiated dream. Ophelia is also present in Verhaerens work, but as a gure
of madness, the corpse of reason, which trails across the Thames toward the en-
gulng abyss. Madmen are recurrent in Verhaerens Les Campagnes Hallucines, an-
alogues of the poet, engaged in subjective deformation of the world which they
perceive. Convalescents and invalids are present in the poetry of Rodenbach, Ve-
rhaeren and Maeterlinck. In Rodenbachs verse, the invalid is a being of silence
and introspection, cloistered from the tumult of the world. In Verhaerens poetry,
there are the skeptical ill, tormented by disbelief. Maeterlinck presents the fever-
ish invalid, weak, helpless, and lost in hallucination. The nun, engaged in lace-
making or the singing of canticles, is a prevalent gure in Rodenbachs poetry,
suggesting the pure and sacrosanct nature of artistic creation. Conversely, the nun
in Maeterlincks world is associated with hospitals, sickbeds, and premonitions of
death. In general, Catholicism as a source of decor and imagery is more markedly
present in Belgian than French Symbolism. Albert Girauds Pierrot becomes a
priest and offers his heart as the eucharist. Iwan Gilkin adapts the litany and rosary
forms to convey decadent erotic experiences. Litanies and orisons, hypnotic in
their repetitions, are also forms favored by Maeterlinck in the Serres Chaudes. Max
Elskamps In Memoriam, from Sous les Tentes de lExode, is similarly a litany of
dejection. Decaying, dank churches and all they contain become sources of im-
agery in the verse of Rodenbach and Verhaeren, who use fallen religious edices as
metaphors for spiritual malaise and the general ruination of a world in entropy.
Except in the Chanson dEve, the pagan, liberated climate of Mallarms artist-faun
seems excluded from the imaginary universe of Belgian Symbolism, where even
the gleaming, joyous isles of Lerberghes Eden alternate with crepuscular spaces of
death and disincarnation.
From the distance of a century, a great part of the fascination of Symbolist lit-
erature is its morbidity and thanatopsis, its emphasis of the nebulous rather than
the fulsome and solidly permanent, silence rather than speech, and states of immo-
bility and suspense rather than motion. Within the general matrix of this poetry of
detachment from the mundane, the Belgian Symbolists have created their own
worlds suffused with mystery. With their hallucinated fusions of the exterior and
the interior, literary fulcrums between the seen and unseen, the Belgians of the
turn of the century evoked lasting zones and magnets of the poetic imagination,
realms of Hypnos, the arbiter of dream.
Notes
1. Victor Remouchamps. Le Monde Intrieur in Le Reveil. (Janvier, 1894), p.25.

2. Emile Verhaeren. Le Symbolisme in LArt Moderne. (Avril, 1887), p.p. 115118.
3. Stphane Mallarm. Rsponses des Enqutes. Oeuvres Compltes. (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1945), p. 869.
1 Georges Rodenbach
Selections from:
The Reign of Silence
Le Rgne du Silence (1891)
The Enclosed Lives
Les Vies Encloses (1896)
The Mirror of the Native Sky
Le Miroir du ciel natal (1898)
Georges Rodenbach (18551898)
Commentary
A pivotal gure in Belgian letters, Georges Rodenbach was among the

rst to adapt French Symbolist poetics of inwardness and indeterminacy
to a theme rmly rooted in experience of his native Flanders. Born in
Tournai and raised in Ghent, Rodenbach explored in his writing villes mortes,
dead cities, medieval Flemish canal cities in lingering decline. Ghent and espe-
cially Bruges were Rodenbachs sacred places, the mythicized cities of his soul and
imagination. Rodenbach ltered the actual geographical cities through his subjec-
tive mood, transforming them into a literary world of solitude. Rodenbachs
poetry is claustral and hushed; the Flemish city which is his obsessive theme is a
private, interior realm, a wavering Other World of symbolic lifelessness.
Rodenbachs dead city is nebulous, a place where all is a shade of grey, cloaked
in the color of fog. The city is drained of life-force by means of imagery of es-
tompe, the blurring and fading of the visible, and attente, suspended anima-
tion. Severed from the commercial activity of the medieval past and without a fu-
ture, the literary Bruges is a lingering ghost, a city of memory and dream. The
nuanced moods concretized by Rodenbachs canal city are of two types, expressive
of conicting attitudes toward solitude. In its inertia, the city may suggest a land-
scape of transxed pain, in which the fearful loneliness of the citys observer is mir-
rored in the tomb-like abandonment of the surroundings. Conversely, the somno-
lent city may suggest a paradisal condition of Schopenhaurian will-lessness, repose
and release from striving, a oating disassociation from the concerns of living.
By turns evocative of the void or of meditative stillness, Rodenbachs Bruges is
a shifting constellation of symbolic constructions: the monastic city of silence; the
city of distortion, in which inanimate objects are endowed with uncanny sen-
tience; the city of decay and spiritual malaise. Encompassingly, Bruges is the site of
Orphic descent into the hidden recesses of interiority, signaled by the omnipres-
ence of watery depths, the seductively beckoning world of the canal. Still water,
retaining reected images of the past, is Rodenbachs paradigm for the uncon-
scious and memory. The motionless water of Bruges is also lethal, attenuating the
denitude of the world it reects and rendering it posthumous. For Rodenbach,
the mirage of the canal city was the quintessential space of poetry, zone of the sug-
gestive which lures us to realization before dissolving into the mystery which is its
essential nature.
Although he died at the age of forty-three, Georges Rodenbach has a promi-
nent place in the history of international Symbolism. His collections of poetry, Le
Georges Rodenbach 7
Rgne du Silence (1891), Les Vies encloses (1896), Le Miroir du ciel natal (1898), as well
as his widely read novel, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), established the dead city as a
prominent and recurrent literary motif. Rodenbachs Bruges also inspired many
visual artists, foremost among them the Belgian, Fernand Khnopff (18581921).
Khnopff s imaginative reconstructions of Bruges emphasize the reected space of
the canal, moods of ineffable quietude, but also the fearful paralysis of suspended
animation. Depicted with pastel and pencil in faded, twilit hues, Khnopff s
Bruges, like Rodenbachs, is evanescent and diaphanous, a space of tenuous sug-
gestion and hovering mirage.
The Poetry of Georges Rodenbach:
Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Genve: Slatkine Reprints, 1978).

Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1923).
See also the following reedition of Rodenbachs experiment in sustained symbol-
ist prose: Christian Berg, ed. Bruges-la-Morte (Bruxelles: Labor, 1986).
The indolent mist of autumn . . .

from The Miror of the Native Sky
The indolent mist of autumn at last dispersed . . .

It hovers between the towers, like the incense full of dreams,
Which will linger in the naves after the most solemn Mass;
And it sleeps like cloth spread on the dejected, grey ramparts.
It comes unfolded, then folds back on itself, like a wing,

In imperceptible motion, yet incessant, in the fog;
All is shaded to a blur and turns slightly divine,
As beneath the pallid brushing, all is vague and lost in dreams.
All is a shade of grey, cloaked in the color of fog:

The sky with its ancient pinions, the water and the poplars,
Old friends, reconciled, so easily, with the haze of the past autumn,
Like all things which will soon be nothing but the faintest memory.
The victorious mist, against the pale depth of air,

Has diluted even the accustomed towers,
Whose grey thoughts are now gone forever,
Like some vague dream, or a geometry of vapor.
Deceased are the patrician mansions . . .

from The Reign of Silence
Deceased are the patrician mansions,

And eternally enfolded in silence,
Lost in the frozen quarters of ancient cities,
Where the pinions, caught in a motionless night,
Mourn their lost treasures in diaphanous evenings,
Which descend upon them from the fading sunlight;
Thus, to adorn the tears of these ancient dwellings,
Which are like the dismal tombs of vanished things,
At the quarter hour, the carillon bell languidly strews,
Its heavy owers of iron upon the void of the streets.
Georges Rodenbach 9
Le brouillard indolet de lautomne . . .

from Le Miroir du Ciel Natal
Le brouillard indolent de lautomne est pars . . .

Il otte entre les tours comme lencens qui rve
Et sattarde aprs la grandmesse dans les nefs;
Et il dort comme du linge sur les remparts.
Il se dplie et se replie. Et cest une aile

Aux mouvements imperceptibles et sans n;
Tout sestompe; tout prend un air un peu divin;
Et, sous ces frlements ples, tout se nivelle.
Tout est gris, tout revt la couleur de la brume:

Le ciel, les vieux pignons, les eaux, les peupliers,
Que la brume aisment a rconcilis
Comme tout ce qui est dj presque posthume.
Brouillard vainqueur qui, sur le fond ple de lair,

A mme dlay les tours accoutumes
Dont llancement gris sefface et na plus lair
Quun songe de gomtrie et de fumes.
Trs dfuntes sont les maisons . . .

from Le Rgne du Silence
Trs dfuntes sont les maisons patriciennes

Et trs dornavant closes dans du silence
Parmi des quartiers froids, en des villes anciennes,
O les pignons, pris dune inerte somnolence,
Ne voient plus rien de grand, dans le soir diaphane,
Qui descende sur eux du soleil qui se fane;
Et, pour eurir le deuil de ces vieilles demeures
Qui sont les tombeaux noirs des choses disparues,
Seul le carillon lent sme tous les quarts dheures
Ses lourdes eurs de fer dans le vide des rues!
Fernand Khnopff. An Abandoned City. 1904.
Fernand Khnopff. At Bruges. A church portal.
The ancient church hovers . . .

from The Mirror of the Native Sky
The ancient church hovers in a dream of vast silence,

Surrounded by a dead city and all of its sadness;
One senses its failing presence, like that of an invalid,
And all is made somber by the shadow of the tower.
A twilight of half-mourning pervades all of the naves;

Outside, the piercing, repeated lament of swallows is heard.
Only those blue windows retain their former pride,
As Mary grows pale in her old lacework.
How all is aged and all grown poor. The high pillars
Seem tree-trunks in a dim forest, bereft of their branches.
A distant hint, the vague odor of a wound is sensed;
Could a crucix, somewhere, have begun to drip its blood?
Ah! to inhale that sickly smell of ancient church,

Insipid, yet sensual and inducing reeling faintness:
Fragrant lilies, Christmas mangers with faded straw,
Hesitant incense, that dies in the grey shadows;
Golden wine evaporated from the agon; waxen

Candles, whose torment atones our sins;
All mingled with many other scents: stale altar-cloths
And wedding veils, garlanded with orange-owers.
And the ever present and enduring human smell

Of the throng met here, of whom God alone knows the count,
Copious tears of repentance and sweats of shame,
The slow odor of the centuries, trailing forever . . .
Odor of death, as well, for everything is dying!

This church is far too old and the city far too quiet;
There is nothing but tombstones in the naves and the choirs,
And who can tell how many cofns have passed these portals!
Yes, everything is dead and dies ceaselessly here:

Incense in the nothingness, today in the long ago;
The faces in the ancient portraits perish as well;
And all who enter must dream of those bones, displayed in glass . . .
Georges Rodenbach 13
La vieille glise rve . . .

La vieille glise rve en un vaste silence;

La ville morte, avec sa tristesse, est autour;
On en sent, comme dun malade, la prsence,
Et tout est assombri par lombre de la tour.
Il rgne dans les nefs un jour de demi-deuil;

On entend, au dehors, pleurer les hirondelles;
Seuls les vitraux dazur gardent un peu dorgueil;
Et la Vierge plit dans ses vieilles dentelles.
Tout est g, tout sappauvrit; les hauts piliers

Semblent les troncs, veufs de rameaux, dune futaie;
On sent une lointaine et vague odeur de plaie;
Est-ce quun crucix se mettrait saigner?
Ah! cette maladive odeur de vieille glise,

Fade, mais sensuelle, et qui fait quon dfaille:
Lys, crches de Nol dont se fane la paille,
Encens irrsolu qui meurt dans lombre grise;
Vin dor vapor des burettes, bougies

Dont la souffrance aura rachet nos pchs;
Et tant dodeurs encor: les nappes dfrachies
Et les voiles de noce aux bouquets dorangers.
Et vous aussi, votre immortelle odeur humaine,

Foule venue ici dont Dieu seul sait le compte:
Larmes du repentir et sueur de la honte,
Odeur des sicleslourde, et qui toujours se trane . . .
Odeur de mort aussi, car tout ici se meurt!

Cette glise est trop vieille et la ville est trop morte;
Ce ne sont que tombeaux dans les nefs et le choeur,
Et combien de cercueils en ont franchi les portes!
Oui! tout est mort! Oui! tout se meurt sans cesse ici:
Lencens dans le nant, aujourdhui dans nagures;
Les visages des vieux tableaux meurent aussi;
Et chacun pense aux ossements des reliquaires . . .
My city, beloved sister . . .

My city, beloved sister, whom I resemble,

City of decline, the prey of doleful bells,
We both no longer know the venturesome vessels,
Swelling, like breasts, their sails in the sun,
Like breasts, swelling with passion for the sea.
We are both the grieving city, which sleeps tfully
And dreams of the ships,
Once anchored in its bitter harbor,
Where in days of old,
The proud ships mirrored their shining sides of gold;
Gone now, the sounds and reections . . . The reeds,
With their sword-blades, seem to hold the water prisoner,
Those vacant waters, those widowed waters, where only the wind
Still circulates, whisperingly, to wrap them in a shroud . . .
Both of us, we are the sadness of a harbor:
You, my sorrowful sister, city, who has nothing
But silence and regret for those former masts;
And I, for whom life is nothing but a cold canal.
The chamber, sad and weary . . .

from The Enclosed Lives
The chamber, sad and weary, has at last grown resigned,

And abandons itself to the evening, which slyly steals in:
The chamber seems larger and also seems more nude;
The shadows have woven the threads of their web
In the corners of the ceiling, the rst to grow dark.
It fades all the fabrics, deepening their color;
In the mirror, turned pale, the reections come undone,
Like an Ophelia in tears as she sinks;
And the pleats of the draperies resemble old pathways,
The deepest to be found, along old roads and lands.
The evening grows old, frightened of the lights,

And crowds around the candles and dim lamps, most hated,
Which already plan to make the Shadow bleed.
Everything withers in the growing darkness;
A bouquet was smiling there, but now drowns,
O ville, toi ma soeur . . .

O ville, toi ma soeur qui je suis pareil,

Ville dchue, en proie aux cloches, tous les deux
Nous ne connaissons plus les vaisseaux hasardeux
Tendant comme des seins leurs voiles au soleil,
Comme des seins gons par lamour de la mer.
Nous sommes tous les deux la ville en deuil qui dort
Et na plus de vaisseaux parmi son port amer,
Les vaisseaux qui jadis y miraient leurs ancs dor;
Plus de bruits, de reets . . . Les glaives des roseaux
Ont un air de tenir prisonnires les eaux,
Les eaux vides, les eaux veuves, o le vent seul
Circule comme pour les tendre en linceul . . .
Nous sommes tous les deux la tristesse dun port:
Toi, ville! toi ma soeur douloureuse qui nas
Que du silence et le regret des anciens mts;
Moi, dont la vie aussi nest quun grand canal mort!
La chambre triste et lasse . . .

from Les Vies Encloses
La chambre triste et lasse est enn rsigne

Et sabandonne au soir qui, sournois, sinsinue:
La chambre a lair plus grande, a lair aussi plus nue;
Lombre a tiss ses ls de toile daraigne
Dans les angles, dabord plus obscurs, du plafond.
Elle fane les toffes, elle les fonce;
Dans le miroir blmi, les reets se dfont

Comme dune Ophlie en larmes qui senfonce;
Et les plis des rideaux ressemblent aux ornires
Trs profondes des vieux chemins dun vieux pays.
Le soir samasse, ayant la crainte des lumires,
Autour du lustre et des lampes, surtout has,
Qui mditent dj de faire saigner lOmbre.
Tout slague dans les tnbres grandissantes;
Un bouquet riait l, mais il sefface et sombre
Disappeared, and the owers seem absent in the darkness.

The nude bronzes have sad gestures;
The thousand portraits of dead grandmothers
Grow dark, have faces grown much older,
And mourning crepe has covered their blue nery.
The chamber is entirely prey to the evening;
And it seems that all at once the chamber has grown old.
Silence: it is the voice that trails . . .

Silence: it is the voice that trails, wearily,

Of the lady of my Silence, with very gentle step,
Shedding the white lilies of her complexion in the mirror;
Barely convalescent, she watches everything in the distance,
The trees, a passer-by, the bridges, a stream,
Where wander the great clouds of daylight,
But who, still too feeble, is suddenly struck
With the tedium of living and a feeling of loathing,
And more subtle, being ill and half-exhausted,
She says: The noise hurts me; have the windows closed . . .
At first, the aquarium seems not to be alive . . .

At rst, the aquarium seems not to be alive,

Uninhabited as a mirror in a convent,
A twilight, where mists are constantly distilled,
Its sleep is so pale that it seems long deceased,
And the dark reections, which come and go,
Are only wandering shadows on a deathbed,
Or the furtive play of a nightlight on the ceiling.
Now and again, however, something strays in the water,

Circulates, unfolds itself, or moves obliquely;
The water contracts in a luminous shivering, which breaks
Into dying spasms of light, found in a diamond;
A dark sh undulates; grass, dressed in mourning, stirs;
Et, dans lobscurit, les eurs sont comme absentes;

Les bronzes nus ont des gestes dcourags;
Les vieux portraits daeuls, ceux des aeules feues,
Sassombrissent, ont des visages plus gs,
Et du crpe a couvert leurs fanfreluches bleues.
La chambre est tout entire en proie au soir; et cest
Comme si tout coup la chambre veillissait.
Silence: cest la voix qui se trane . . .

Silence: cest la voix qui se trane, un peu lasse,

De la dame de mon Silence, trs doux pas
Effeuillant les lis blancs de son teint dans la glace;
Convalescent peine, et qui voit tout l-bas
Les arbres, les passants, des ponts, une rivire,
O cheminent de grands nuages de lumire,
Mais qui, trop faible encore, est prise tout coup
Dun ennui de la vie et comme dun dgot
Et,plus subtile, tant malade,mi-brise,
Dit: Le bruit me fait mal; quon ferme la croise . . .
Laquarium dabord ne semble pas vivant . . .

Laquarium dabord ne semble pas vivant,

Inhabit comme un miroir dans un couvent;
Crpuscule o toujours se reforme une brume;
Il dort si plement quon le croirait posthume
Et que les reets noirs qui viennent et sen vont
Ne sont quombres sans but sur un lit mortuaire
Et jeux furtifs de veilleuse sur le plafond.
Pourtant dans leau, de temps en temps, quelque chose erre,

Circule, se dplie, ou bouge obliquement;
Des frissons lumineux crispent cette eau qui mue,
Tels les spasmes de lumire du diamant!
Un poisson sombre ondule, une herbe en deuil remue;
The soft sand, on the bottom, rises and collapses,

As if the Hour in a sandglass were shaken in confusion;
And sometimes, attened against the chill crystal,
A accid monstrosity approaches its distorted image;
Meanwhile, the water suffers, though appearing to sleep,
And feels passing through its melancholy lethargy,
The thousand shadows, with which it trembles endlessly,
And which opens, in its surface, an enlarged wound.
But this is the very picture of human sleep,

Where, in the water of the mind, believed drained and bare,
Submarine dreams are ceaselessly underway,
An entire occult life, which is never ending.
The long line of streetlamps . . .

The long line of streetlamps

Have lit their pensive lights,
Daily, as expected,
Forming a play of silent shadows,
That come and go.
Does the City sicken

At evening?
You would think that it was growing darker;
Then wind seems to be lamenting
Someone who will never again be cured;
A little bell rings
The last angelus;
The air is resonant, because of the silence;
The poplars, holding their leaves still,
Are afraid of making noise;
And the passers-by mufe their steps in a mist,
As if in a chamber, at the bedside . . .
The water whispers more softly beneath the arch

Of the ancient bridges;
It seems to be praying with its sighs,
But for what?
Le sable mou du fond sboule comme si

Ctait le sablier boulevers de lHeure;
Et quelquefois aussi, sur le cristal transi,
Un monstre asque, en trouble imagerie, afeure,
Cependant que leau souffre, en paraissant dormir,
Et sent passer, dans sa morose lthargie,
Mille ombres dont elle ne cesse de frmir
Qui font de sa surface une plaie largie!
Or nest-ce pas limage du sommeil humain

O, dans leau du cerveau quon croit vide et nue,
Des rves sous-marins sont sans cesse en chemin,
Ah! cette vie occulte, et qui se continue!
Les rverbres en enfilade . . .

Les rverbres en enlade

Ont allum leurs pensives veilleuses
Quotidiennes,
Formant un jeu dombres silencieuses
Qui vont et viennent . . .
La Ville est-elle plus malade

Le soir?
On dirait quil fait plus noir;
Le vent a lair de plaindre
Quelquun qui ne gurira plus;
Une petite cloche tinte
Le dernier anglus;
Lair est sonore cause du silence;
Les peupliers, dont la cime slance,
Ont peur de faire trop de bruit;
Et les passants embrument leur marche
Comme dans une chambre, autour dun lit . . .
Leau chuchote plus bas sous lunique arche

Des vieux ponts;
On dirait quelle prie avec des soupirs;
Mais quoi bon?
Is the City not worsening

This evening?
The lights of the streetlamps
Hold on to a last glimmer of hope;
They are like eyes,
Votive ames,
Illusory ames and eyes.
O streetlamps! They take alarm

And sense death on the way;
There is something human about them,
They tremble and seem to grow pale,
As if there were tears within their ame!
Who will soon die?
A swan, forewarned, sings on the black water . . .
It must be the City that is dying

This evening . . .
The streetlamps weep!
The Night is alone, like a beggar . . .

The Night is alone, like a beggar.

The streetlamps offer
Their yellow ame
As alms.
The night is as quiet as a locked church.

The melancholy streetlamps
Open their rose ame,
Bright bouquets of light,
Bouquets under glass, the holy relics
That ll the Night with plenary Indulgence.
Sans doute que la Ville empire

Ce soir?
Les veilleuses des rverbres
A peine encore un peu esprent;
Elles sont comme des yeux;
Comme des feux dvotieux,
Yeux et feux illusoires.
O rverbres! Ils salarment

Et sentent la mort en chemin;
Ils ont quelque chose dhumain,
Ils tremblent et semblent plir
Comme si dans leur amme il y avait des larmes!
Quest-ce qui va mourir?
Un cygne averti chante sur leau noire . . .
Il se peut que la Ville meure

Ce soir . . .
Les rverbres pleurent!
La Nuit est seule, comme un pauvre. . . .

La Nuit est seule, comme un pauvre.

Les rverbres offrent
Leur amme jaune
Comme une aumne.
La nuit se tait comme une glise close.

Les rverbres mlancoliques
Ouvrent leur amme rose
Comme des bouquets de lumire,
Des bouquets sous un verre et qui sont des reliques,
Par qui la Nuit semplit dIndulgences plnires.
The Night endures pain!

The streetlamps, in a chorus,
Dart their red and sulphurous ame,
Like votive images,
And Sacred Hearts,
Which the wind bleeds with cold knives.
The Night grows inamed!

The streetlamps, in a row,
Unfurl their blue ame,
Along the outskirts,
Like souls, stopping for rest,
Souls of the days dead, treading the roadways,
Who dream of return to their locked houses,
As they linger, a long time, at the city gates.
Sweet is the room . . .

Sweet is the room!a gentle, secluded harbor,

Where, weary of stretching its sails to the wind,
My dream has come to rest in the mirror, pale and still.
Tired! Without longing for new headways of stars,
Departures for islands, my dream is sound asleep
In the profound mirror, as if in a silent canal;
And why hope for some sudden gust of wind, to drive
To high seas, this soul anchored in the looking-glass?
During those hours of sad evening . . .

During those hours of sad evening, when you wish you were dead,
When the heart is desolate and so weary, the soul,
How soothing to approach the mirror and gaze,
Calm waters of the mirror, impossible to exhaust,
Where you lose yourself, drifting from shore, in retreat . . .
Oh! to set out in the cooling water of the mirror,
To perish, somewhat, as if in the water of twilight,
La Nuit souffre!
Les rverbres en choeur
Dardent leur amme rouge et soufre
Comme des exvoto,
Comme des Sacr-Coeur,
Que le vent fait saigner avec ses froids couteaux.
La Nuit sexalte!
Les rverbres la le
Dploient leur amme bleue,
Dans les banlieues,
Comme des mes qui font halte,
Les mes en chemin des morts de la journe
Qui rvent de rentrer dans leur maison ferme
Et sattardent longtemps aux portes de la ville.
la chambre, un doux port relgu . . .

Oui! cest doux! cest, la chambre, un doux port relgu

O mon rve, lass de tendre au vent ses voiles,
Dans le miroir tranquille et ple sest cargu.
Las! sans plus esprer des sillages dtoiles
Et des dparts vers des les, mon rve dort
Dans le profond miroir, comme en un canal mort;
Et faut-il dsirer un coup de vent qui chasse
En pleine mer cette me lancre dans la glace?
Aux heures de soir morne . . .

Aux heures de soir morne o lon voudrait mourir,

O lon se sent le coeur trop seul, lme trop lasse,
Quel rafrachissement de se voir dans la glace!
Eau calme du miroir impossible tarir;
On y soublie; on y drive; on y recule . . .
Oh! sen aller dans le miroir rfrigrant
Prir un peu comme en une eau de crpuscule,
A stagnant water, aimless, without currents,

Where the nude face sinks down, always in place;
You pursue, seek yourself, losing yourself forever,
In backward movement, in the depths of the looking-glass.
You nd yourself still, but as if covered over
By a vast, endless water, barely transparent,
Which allows you to observe, but pale and changed,
The face that you will have when ill or very old,
The most simplied face, joined in silent marriage,
To the face that you will last have, when dead . . .
More and more, the evening submerges the image,
Forcing it down, like a surviving moon,
Weakening it, like the dying sound of a horn,
A face in ight and which all the shadows stain,
A face, which seems already to have done,
Sunken, disappeared in innity;
Oh, this play in the mirror, where you watch your own destruction!
At evening, they appear . . .

At evening, they appear at the windows of the soul,

Those former faces, which have remained in the glass,
In spite of time, their remembrance has endured,
Faces from the past, so painful to meet again;
Brows ceaselessly grown pale; lips with lost bloom;
Eyes covered each day with fresh layers of shadows,
Which add, in our thought, the nishing touches to their death . . .
The face of a mother or a wife,
That lived, long ago, on intimate terms with our soul;
If you could only revive their owering, a little,
Those faces in the windows, scarcely shaded,
To see their features clearly, once more, in our memory!
Dead faces, forever on the verge of vanishing,
And then, once forgotten, incessantly emerging,
Down the stream of the soul, with the distress of an Ophelia,
She, with axen hair, who is always weeping . . .
Ah! where is joy in life to be found,
When the panes of the loving soul are a water,
Where endlessly surfaces and endlessly drowns,
Some gentle, intermittent face, with its halo.
Une eau stagnante, une eau sans but et sans courant

O le visage nu sombre la mme place.
On se poursuit soi-mme, on se cherche, on se perd
Dans le recul, dans la profondeur de la glace;
On sy dcouvre encor, mais comme recouvert
Dune eau vaste et sans n, peine transparente,
Qui fait que lon se voit, mais ple et tout chang,
Visage quon aura malade ou trs g,
Visage tout simpli qui sapparente,
Silencieux, avec celui quon aura mort . . .
Le soir de plus en plus en submerge limage
Et lenfonce comme une lune qui surnage,
Et laffaiblit comme les sons mourants dun cor,
Visage en fuite et que toute lombre macule,
Visage qui dj se semble avoir ni
Daller jusqu lenlizement dans linni.
O ce jeu du miroir o soi-mme on sannule!
Aux vitres de notre me . . .

Aux vitres de notre me apparaissent le soir

Des visages anciens demeurs dans le verre;
Leur souvenir, malgr le temps, y persvre,
Visages du pass quon souffre de revoir:
Fronts sans cesse plis; lvres dveloutes;
Yeux couverts chaque jour dombres surajoutes
Et qui dans la mmoire achvent de mourir . . .
Visage dune mre ou visage de femme
Qui jadis ont vcu le plus prs de notre me.
Encor si lon pouvait un peu les reeurir
Ces faces, dans le verre, peine nuances
Et voir distinctement leurs traits dans nos penses!
Faces mortes toujours prs de svanouir
Et sans cesse mergeant,sitt quon les oublie,-
Au l de lme, en des dtresses dOphlie
Dont les cheveux de lin ont un air de rouir.
Ah! comment essayer davoir un peu de joie
Quand les vitres de lme aimante sont de leau
O reparat sans cesse et sans cesse se noie
Un doux visage intermittent dans un halo!
Water, for the sufferer . . .

Water, for the sufferer, is a sister of charity,

Who could satisfy not one human desire,
And who hides sweetly, with a bitter smile,
Beneath a veil, a robe of darkness;
Her love of silence, her loathing of life
Are so contagious, that more than one has entered
Her chapel of shadows, her pious depths,
Where placidly she sings, near the green reeds,
Organ of verdant pipes that accompanies her softly.
She sings! she says: The sweet retreat that I will give
To those much discouraged . . .
Ah! the gentle fascination of that heavenly voice!
For their fever, it offers the coolness of an eternal bed!
And many, lured by the benign call,
Paralyzed, enter the water as one enters an asylum,
And then die, for the water cleanses, enshrouds them
In her currents as fresh as ne linen;
Then, at last, they have found gentle death.
Meanwhile, the evening, all around the body at rest,
Will kindle, in the dark water, a bright catafalque of stars.
O snow, the sweet sound . . .

O snow, the sweet sound, who lulls the night,

So gentle, you, the most pensive sister of silence,
The immaculate balance in a cloak of indolence,
Preserving your pallor throughout the vespers.
Sweet! you smother and enfeeble
All of the tumult, shapes, uproar;
Wavering snow, you seem to vanish,
Far, most far away, in the haze of the streets!
And you die the death, for which we have prayed,
A white end, thoughtful, pious, serene,
A pardoned death, which slowly tells
LEau, pour qui souffre . . .

LEau, pour qui souffre, est une soeur de charit

Que na pu satisfaire aucune joie humaine
Et qui se cache, douce et le sourire amre,
Sous une guimpe et sous un froc dobscurit;
Son amour du repos, son dgot de la vie
Sont si contagieux que plus dun la suivie
Dans la chapelle dombre, au fond pieux des eaux,
O, tranquille, elle chante au pied des longs roseaux
Dont lorgue aux verts tuyaux laccompagne en sourdine.
Elle chante! Elle dit: Les doux abris que jai

Pour ceux de qui le coeur est trop dcourag. . .
Ah! la molle attirance et quelle voix divine!
Car, pour leur vre, cest la fracheur dun bon lit!
Et beaucoup, aimants par cet appel propice,
Perclus, entrent dans lEau comme on entre lhospice,
Puis meurent. LEau les lave et les ensevelit
Dans ses courants aussi frais que de nes toiles;
Et cest enn vraiment pour eux la Bonne Mort.
Ce pendant que, le soir, autour du corps qui dort,
LEau noire allume un grand catafalque dtoiles.
O neige, toi la douce endormeuse . . .

O neige, toi la douce endormeuse des bruits

Si douce, toi la soeur pensive du silence,
O toi limmacule en manteau dindolence
Qui gardes ta pleur mme travers les nuits.
Douce! tu les teins et tu les attnues
Les tulmutes pars, les contours, les rumeurs;
O neige vacillante, on dirait que tu meurs
Loin, tout au loin, dans le vague des avenues!
Et tu meurs dune mort comme nous linvoquons,
Une mort blanche et lente et pieuse et sereine,
Une mort pardonne et dont le calme grne
A chaplet of wadding, a rosary of akes.

And the end draws near: beneath its somber veils,
The sky has passed away; see how it crumbles in akes;
The sky collapses and my heart, lled with astral light,
Becomes a vast cemetery of stars.
Un chapelet de ouate, un rosaire en ocons.

Et cest la n: le ciel sous de funbres toiles
Est trpass; voici quil croule en ocons lents,
Le ciel croule; mon coeur se remplit dastres blancs
Et mon coeur est un grand cimetire dtoiles!
ii Emile Verhaeren
Selections from:
The Evenings (1887)
Les Soirs
Les Dbcles (1888)
The Black Torches (1891)
Les Flambeaux Noirs
The Hallucinated Countrysides (1893)
Les Campagnes Hallucines
The Illusory Villages (1895)
Les Villages Illusoires
The Cities with Pinions (1909)
Les Villes Pignons
Emile Verhaeren (18551916)
Commentary
Emile Verhaeren was a member of the francophone bourgeoisie of

Flanders. He was born in the village of Saint-Amand, near Antwerp,
and educated at Ghent and the University of Louvain, where he met
Max Waller and other founding members of La Jeune Belgique, the rst important
literary review devoted to new poetry in Belgium. During stays in Paris, Ver-
haeren entered the circle of Villiers de lIsle-Adam and the symbolist milieu of
Mallarm. Although widely known as a poet of energy and tumultuous force,
Verhaerens early period, 18871890, is nonetheless steeped in decadent morbidity
and reveals the dejection of the symbolist psyche. His Black Trilogy, Les Soirs
(1888), Les Dbcles (1889), and Les Flambeaux Noirs (188990) explores the spiri-
tual abandonment of a soul lost in the recesses of its own involution. The con-
stant theme of this poetry is madness, the twilight of reason, given both stylistic
and imagistic expression. Disjuncted grammar, insistent repetitions and ques-
tions, and truncated lines of free verse convey a halting anguish and mental inco-
herence. Verhaerens concrete images are hallucinated, outsized and exaggerated,
to convey moods of alienation and tormented obsession. In this manner, London
becomes the poets private hell, an inextricable labyrinth of decay, full of dis-
mantled ships and splintered masts splayed against a sky of crucixion. The
broken boats of the dockyards and the livid light convey a state of psychic disinte-
gration and opaque solitude. Vesperal is a panorama of pain, lingeringly mov-
ing from stanza to stanza through a painterly landscape of dry-rot and leprosy.
In Fatal Flower, the persona seeks the white suns of moonlight and the scep-
tical invalids of The Ill yearn for the smoldering far reaches of madness and
hysteria. In the violent and blood-thirsty city of Revolt, a clock-face hurls its
wrathful disk against a sky splattered red with stars. The poets orb, the moon
in Tenebrae, is cyclopean, a chilling eye, presiding over a frozen landscape of
inanition. Throughout the Black Trilogy, the poets interior wound is mirrored in
funereal landscapes of dullness, putrefaction, or deranged fury. With the combi-
nation of minute observation and subjective distortion which typies Belgian
Symbolism, the world is molded and made to conform to the poets uninching,
nihilistic vision.
Though concentrated in the Black Trilogy, it is important to note that this dark
phase of Verhaerens creation is not delimited. Experiences of self-torment and de-
jection are recurrent in Les Campagnes Hallucines (1893), in which madmens
songs form the thread of the collection, Les Villages Illusoires (1895) and Les Villes
Emile Verhaeren 33
Pignons (1910). There is a Verhaeren, the optimistic poet of the industrial metrop-
olis, but there is also Verhaeren, the consummate Symbolist, whose achievement
was to give expression to fragmented consciousness, using a French which is his
own distinctive language of poetry.
As the visual quality of his poetry would suggest, Emile Verhaeren was a subtle
critic of painting, who was among the rst to understand the work of Fernand
Khnopff and James Ensor. The symbolist artist, William Degouve de Nunques
(18671935) was Verhaerens close friend and brother-in-law. Degouves A Canal,
an uncommonly elongate, attened composition, visual analogue of Verhaerens
sytactical distortions, depicts a ruinous building, suggestive of shattered hopes,
nerves, dreams. The insistent repetition of broken windows and spiky trees, like
the obsessive refrain in Verhaerens poetry, is hallucinatory. In Degouves Flemish
snowscapes, as in Verhaerens polar Flanders in Tenebrae, there is no struggle,
there is no action in a world given over to absolute immobility.
The Poetry of Emile Verhaeren:
Oeuvres compltes, 3 vols. (Genve: Slatkine Reprints, 1977).

Les Villages Illusoires; Pomes en Prose; extraits de la Trilogie Noire, ed. Christian
Berg. (Bruxelles: Labor, 1985).
Les Campagnes Hallucines; Les Villes Tentaculaires, ed. Maurice Piron. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1982).
Pomes choisis, ed. Robert Vivier. (Bruxelles: La Renaissance du Livre, 1981).
Toute la Flandre. (Paris: Larousse, 1965).
The Corpse
from The Debacles (1888)
In her dress, the color of re and poison,

The corpse of my reason
Trails across the Thames.
Bridges of bronze, where the carts

Crash and burst in endless din,
And the sails of somber boats,
Cast upon her their trail of shadows.
Without a clock-hand moving across its dial,

A mighty bell-tower, masked in red,
Stares at her, like someone
Immensely sunk in sorrow and death.
She knew too much to live any longer,

She longed too much to shape the truth,
Enthroned on the pedestal of black rocks,
Of every breath and every shadow.
And now, she is atrociously dead,
Of a venomous elixir, distilled by destiny,
Dead, as well, of a delirious desire,
For the most absurd, scarlet kingdom.
Her bers have burst apart,

Some evening, illuminated for joy,
As she already felt its glory oating
Above her head, like wild eagles.
She is dead of impotence,
Her ardor and will ground to sand,
And it was she who took her life,
Endlessly exhausted.
Along the funereal ramparts,

All along the iron factories,
Where the hammers pound the light,
She trails her way to burial.
These are the piers and the barracks,

Always piers and their lanterns,
Slow, motionless spinners
Of the dark gold of their lights;
Emile Verhaeren 35
La Morte
En sa robe, couleur de feu et de poison,

Le cadavre de ma raison
Trane sur la Tamise.
Des ponts de bronze, o les wagons

Entrechoquent dinterminables bruits de gonds
Et des voiles de bteaux sombres
Laissent sur elle, choir leur ombres.
Sans quune aiguille, son cadran, ne bouge,

Un grand beffroi masqu de rouge,
La regarde, comme quelquun
Immensment de triste et de dfunt.
Elle est morte de trop savoir,

De trop vouloir sculpter la cause,
Dans le socle de granit noir,
De chaque tre et de chaque chose.
Elle est morte, atrocement,
Dun savant empoisonnement,
Elle est morte aussi dun dlire
Vers un absurde et rouge empire.
Ses nerfs ont clat,

Tel soir illumin de fte
Quelle sentait dj le triomphe otter
Comme des aigles, sur sa tte.
Elle est morte nen pouvant plus,
Lardeur et les vouloirs moulus,
Et cest elle qui sest tue,
Inniment extnue.
Au long des funbres murailles,

Au long des usines de fer
Dont les marteaux tannent lclair,
Elle se trane aux funrailles.
Ce sont des quais et des casernes,

Des quais toujours et leurs lanternes,
Immobiles et lentes landires
Des ors obscurs de leurs lumires;
There reigns a sadness of rock,

Houses of brick, black turrets,
Where the windows, mournful eyelids,
Open to the mists of evenings.
These are the great stockyards of panic,
Full of dismantled ships
And splintered masts,
Splayed against a sky of crucixion.
In her dress of lifeless jewels, solemnized

By the wine-colored hour on the horizon,
The corpse of my reason
Trails across the Thames.
She sets out for chances,

Hidden in shadow and in the mist,
Alongside the hushed sounds of dull tocsins,
Breaking their wings at the angle of the towers.
In the distance, leaving distressed
The city, breathing life,
She sets out for the dark riddle,
To sleep in the graveyards of evening,
Where the slow, almighty oceans
Open their limitless, gaping mouth,
To devour for all eternity,
The grey corpses of enigma.
The Revolt
from The Black Torches (1891)
Toward some remote city of riot and outcry,

Where the guillotine ashes its shining steel,
With a sudden, insane desire, my heart sets forth.
The mufed drumbeats of many wasted days,

Of silenced rage and suppressed storm,
Sound, in the mind, an impetuous attack.
Emile Verhaeren 37
Ce sont des tristesses de pierres,

Maisons de briques, donjons en noir
Dont les vitres, mornes paupires,
Souvrent dans le brouillard du soir;
Ce sont de grands chantiers daffolement,
Pleins de barques dmanteles
Et de vergues carteles
Sur un ciel de cruciement.
En sa robe de joyaux morts, que solennise

Lheure de pourpre lhorizon,
Le cadavre de ma raison
Trane sur la Tamise.
Elle sen va vers les hasards

Au fond de lombre et des brouillards,
Au long bruit sourd des tocsins lourds,
Cassant leur aile, au coin des tours.
Derrire elle, laissant inassouvie
La ville immense de la vie;
Elle sen va vers linconnu noir
Dormir en des tombeaux de soir,
L-bas, o les vagues lentes et fortes,
Ouvrant leurs trous illimits,
Engloutissent toute ternit:
Les mortes.
La Rvolte
Vers une ville au loin dmeute et tocsin,

O luit le couteau nu des guillotines,
En tout coup de fou dsir, sen va mon coeur.
Les sourds tambours de tant de jours

De rage tue et de tempte,
Battent la charge dans les ttes.
From the black belfry, the old clock-face

Hurls its wrathful disk in the depth of the evening,
Against a stunned heaven, splattered red with stars.
Tolling knells of thudding footsteps resound,

As immense conagrations, raging on roof-tops,
Deface all of the capitals.
They, who could nd no other

Consolation but in somber despair,
Have now stepped down from their silence.
Does anyone know what it is we hear approaching

Upon the pathways of the future,
So quietly terrible?
All of the hatred of the world bursts in the air,

And sts to seize the lightening
Are strained toward the clouds.
Now the hour has arrived when those deluded,

Those destituted and abandoned
Lay siege with their pride upon life.
Now is the hour and, in the distance, the alarm resounds;

Crosses of muskets pound upon my door;
To kill, to be killed! what can it matter?
The Blade
from The Debacles (1888)
Brandishing a sword, someone predicted,

Laughing at my sterilized pride:
You will be a cipher and for your idle soul,
The future will hold nothing more than a regret for the past.
Your body, where has turned sour the blood of pure ancestors,
Weak and clumsy, will be broken with every effort;
You will be the feverish, bent at the window,
Helpless witness of the rushing of life and its golden chariots;
Emile Verhaeren 39
Le cadran vieux dun beffroi noir

Darde son disque au fond du soir,
Contre un ciel dtoiles rouges.
Des glas de pas sont entendus

Et de grands feux de toits tordus
Echevlent les capitales.
Ceux qui ne peuvent plus avoir

Despoir que dans leur dsespoir
Sont descendus de leur silence.
Dites, quoi donc sentend venir

Sur les chemins de lavenir,
De si tranquillement terrible?
La haine du monde est dans lair

Et des poings pour saisir lclair
Sont tendus vers les nues.
Cest lheure o les hallucins

Les gueux et les dracins
Dressent leur orgueil dans la vie.
Cest lheureet cest l-bas que sonne le tocsin;

Des crosses de fusils battent ma porte;
Tuer, tre tu!quimporte!
Le Glaive
Quelquun mavait prdit, qui tenait une pe

Et qui riait de mon orgueil strilis:
Tu seras nul, et pour ton me inoccupe
Lavenir ne sera quun regret du pass.
Ton corps, o sest aigri le sang de purs anctres,

Fragile et lourd, se cassera dans chaque effort;
Tu seras le vreux ploy, sur les fentres,
Do lon peut voir bondir la vie et ses chars dor,
Your nerves will entwine you with their sapless bers,

Your nerves! And your nails will grow soft with boredom,
Your forehead, like a tombstone, will dominate your dreams,
And will become your obsession, in the mirrors, at night.
To y from yourself! If you could! but no, the lassitude

Of others, your own, will have bent your back
So well, riveted your feet so well, that dullness
Will dethrone your mind and will seal your bones with lead.
Dazzling and clacking, the banners toward the battles,

Your bloodless lip, alas, will never know them:
Worn-out, your heart, your mournful heart, in disputes
Over ancient texts, as if slashing away at a cloth.
You will set forth, outcast and alone, and all of the lost days
Of youth will be a worthless magnet
For your wide, distant eyesand the joyous thundering
Will herald the impetuous attack far from you, triumphantly!
The Ill
from The Evenings (1887)
Sallow and alone, they are, the skeptical ill,

Made keen by all their pain. They watch the evening
Grow in their room and lengthen the facades.
Nearby, a church looms and holds high its black belfry.
Dead hour, over there, somewhere in the provinces,

In an extinguished town, in some unknown corner
Where the walls are clad in mourning and portals,
Where grinds the monumental hinge, like a clenched st of iron.
Sallow and alone, the inscrutable ill,

Like dismal, old wolves, x death with their gaze;
They have consumed their lives, since all days are the same,
They will hate those months and years that will bring their sad end.
Emile Verhaeren 41
Tes nerfs tenlaceront de leurs bres sans sves

Tes nerfs!et tes ongles samolliront dennui,
Ton front, comme un tombeau dominera tes rves,
Et sera ta frayeur, en des miroirs, la nuit.
Te fuir!si tu pouvais! mais non, la lassitude

Des autres et de toi taura vot le dos
Si bien, riv les pieds si fort, que lhbtude
Dtrnera ta tte et plombera tes os.
Eclatants et claquants, les drapeaux vers les luttes,

Ta lvre exsangue hlas! jamais ne les mordra:
Us, ton coeur, ton morne coeur, dans les disputes
Des vieux textes, o lon taille comme en un drap.
Tu ten iras part et seulet les nagures

De jeunesse seront un inutile aimant
Pour tes grands yeux lointainset les joyeux tonnerres
Chargeront loin de toi, victorieusement!
Les Malades
Blafards et seuls, ils sont, les sceptiques malades,

Aigus de tous leurs maux. Ils regardent le soir
Se faire dans leur chambre et grandir les facades.
Une glise prs deux lve son clocher noir.
Heure morte, l-bas, quelque part, en province,

En une ville teinte, au fond dun coin dsert,
O sendeuillent des murs et des porches, dont grince
Le gond monumental, ainsi quun poing de fer.
Blafards et seuls, les malades hiratiques,

Pareils de vieux loups mornes, xent la mort;
Ils ont mch la vie et ses jours identiques
Et ses mois et ses ans et leur haine et leur sort.
But today, huddled in the drained cynicism

Of their loathing, their minds nd no rest:
What if happiness resided in virile selshness,
Then to suffer wisely, all alone, by act of will?
Like all the others, they have tritely loved.

They believed piously in bereavements,
In suffering, in preaching gestures of apostles;
Imbeciles, they were too scared to lose their pride.
Now they discuss the ways in which cruelty reconciles

Better than love; how they were deceived
Into disguising ingratitude and blame;
And so many tears spent for a few eyes they kissed one day.
Void, the golden islands, lost in distant fogs of gold,

Where the enthroned dreams, clothed in red,
With frail, golden ngers scattered to the foam
All the silent gold that rained from the sun.
Broken the proud masts, slack the great sails!

Let the barge go where it may and the harbours fade away;
The beacons no longer will strain toward the high stars,
Their arms, vastly on refor the res are all dead!
Sallow and alone, the inscrutable ill,

Like dismal, old wolves, x death with their gaze;
They have consumed their lives, since all days are the same,
They will hate those months and years that will bring their sad end.
And now their bodies? cage of bones for fevers

And their wooden nails, striking their scorching foreheads,
And the peevishness of eyes and their thinness of lips,
And a grit of bitter sand, always, between their teeth;
And regret seizes them and the posthumous desire:

To depart and live again in a new world,
Where the sunset, resembling a aming tripod,
Breathes forth the god of ivory and ebony in their thought.
Beyond, in the far reaches of hysteria and of ame,

And of livid froth and raucous frenzy,
There we could ferociously rend and abolish the soul,
Ferociously joyous, the soul and the heart.
Emile Verhaeren 43
Mais aujourdhui, serrs dans le ple cynisme

De leur dgot, ils ont lesprit inquit:
Si le bonheur rgnait dans ce mle gosme,
Souffrir pour soi, tout seul, mais par sa volont?
Ils ont banalement aim comme les autres

Les autres; ils ont cru benotement aux deuils,
A la souffrance, des gestes prcheurs daptres;
Imbciles, ils ont eu peur de leurs orgueils.
Ils discutent combien la cruaut rapproche

Mieux que lamour; combien ils se sont abuss
A pavoiser lingratitude et le reproche;
Combien de pleurs, pour quelques yeux quils ont baiss!
Vides, les les dor, l-bas, dans lor des brumes,

O les rves assis sous leur manteau vermeil,
Avec de longs doigts dor effeuillaient aux cumes,
Les ors silencieux qui pleuvaient du soleil.
Casss les mts dorgueil, asques, les grandes voiles!

Laissez la barque aller et steindre les ports;
Les phares ne tendront plus vers les grandes toiles,
Leurs bras immensment en feules feux sont morts!
Blafards et seuls, les malades hiratiques,

Pareils de vieux loups mornes, xent la mort;
Ils ont mch la vie et ses jours identiques
Et ses mois et ses ans et leur haine et leur sort.
Et maintenant, leur corps?cage dos pour les vres

Et leurs ongles de bois heurtant leurs fronts ardents,
Et leur hargne des yeux et leur minceur de lvres
Et comme un sable amer, toujours, entre leurs dents.
Et le regret les prend et le dsir posthume:

De sen aller revivre en un monde nouveau
Dont le couchant, pareil un trpied qui fume,
Dresse le Dieu dbne et dos en leur cerveau.
L-bas, en des lointains dhystrie et de amme

Et dcume livide et de rauque fureur,
O lon peut abolir frocement son me,
Frocement joyeux, son me et tout son coeur.
Sallow and alone, they are the tragic ill,

Made keen by all their pain. They watch the ultimate res
Expiring within the town and the pale facades,
Like great winding cloths, stretching toward them.
The Rain
from Illusory Villages (1895)
Long as threads without end, the long rain,

Interminably, through the grey day,
Lines up the green window with its long grey threads,
An innitude of rain,
The long rain,
The rain.
Lingeringly, it unravels, since yesterday evening,

Hanging in heavy, soaked rags,
In the taciturn, black sky,
It unravels, patient and slow,
Upon the pathways, since yesterday evening,
Upon the roads and the winding alleys,
Continuous.
The length of the byways,

Which lead from the woods to the outskirts,
By roads interminably twisted,
They move on, grieving, dripping, steaming,
The yoke-teams, with wagon-cloth bulging;
In the even, beaten tracks,
So ceaselessly parallel,
That, at night, they seem to meet in the heavens,
The water trickles, for hours on end;
And the trees cry their tears and the dwellings,
Soaked by the long rain,
Tenaciously, vague.
Emile Verhaeren 45
Blafards et seuls, ils sont les tragiques malades

Aigus de tous leurs maux. Ils regardent les feux
Mourir parmi la ville et les ples facades
Comme de grands linceuls venir au-devant deux.
La Pluie
Longue comme des ls sans n, la longue pluie

Interminablement, travers le jour gris,
Ligne les carreaux verts avec ses longs ls gris,
Inniment, la pluie,
La longue pluie,
La pluie.
Elle sefle ainsi, depuis hier soir,

Des haillons mous qui pendent,
Au ciel maussade et noir.
Elle stire, patiente et lente,
Sur les chemins, depuis hier soir,
Sur les chemins et les venelles,
Continuelle.
Au long des lieues,

Qui vont des champs vers les banlieues,
Par les routes interminablement courbes,
Passent, peinant, suant, fumant,
En un prol denterrement,
Les attelages, bches bombes;
Dans les ornires rgulires
Parallles si longuement
Quelles semblent, la nuit, se joindre au rmament,
Leau dgoutte, pendant des heures;
Et les arbres pleurent et les demeures,
Mouills quils sont de longue pluie,
Tenacement, indnie.
The streams, through their rotten dikes,

Discharge their burden upon the meadows,
Where drowned hay drifts in the distance;
The wind slaps elder and walnut-trees;
Frightfully, sunk waist-high in the ood,
Huge, black oxen bellow at the twisted skies.
Evening draws close, with all of its shadows,

Obstructing the planes and the copse,
While, forever, it goes on, the rain,
The long rain,
Fine and dense, sodden, like soot.
The long rain,

The rainand all of its identical threads,
And its methodical ngernails
Weave the garment,
Mesh by mesh, of desolation,
For the houses and enclosures,
Of villages, grey and doddering:
Linens and chaplets of tatters,
Which ravel out in uttering rags in the wind,
Along the upright staffs;
Blue dove-cotes pressed to the roof;
Windows and on their disastrous panes,
Wound-dressings of dark bister;
Lodgings, where the regular gutters
Form crucixes on the stone pinions;
Windmills, uniform, mournful, planted
Upon their mounds, like horned cattle;
Belfries and adjacent chapels,

The rain,
The long rain,
All winter long, assassinates them as well.
The rain,
The long rain, with its long, grey threads,
With its damply hanging hair, its ripples,
The long rain,
Upon ancient lands,
Lethargic and eternal.
Emile Verhaeren 47
Les rivires, travers leurs digues pourries,

Se dgonent sur les prairies,
O otte au loin du foin noy;
Le vent gie aulnes et noyers;
Sinistrement, dans leau jusqu mi-corps,
De grands boeufs noirs beuglent vers les cieux tors;
Le soir approche, avec ses ombres,

Dont les plaines et les taillis sencombrent,
Et cest toujours la pluie
La longue pluie
Fine et dense, comme la suie.
La longue pluie,
La pluieet ses ls identiques
Et ses ongles systmatiques
Tissent le vtement,
Maille maille, de dnment,
Pour les maisons et les enclos
Des villages gris et vieillots:
Linges et chapelets de loques
Qui sefloquent,
Au long de btons droits;
Bleus colombiers colls au toit;
Carreaux, avec, sur leur vitre sinistre,
Un empltre de papier bistre;
Logis dont les gouttires rgulires
Forment des croix sur des pignons de pierre;
Moulins plants uniformes et mornes,
Sur leur butte, comme des cornes;
Clochers et chapelles voisines,

La pluie,
La longue pluie,
Pendant lhiver, les assassine.
La pluie.
La longue pluie, avec ses longs ls gris.
Avec ses cheveux deau, avec ses rides.
La longue pluie
Des vieux pays,
Eternelle et torpide!
Infinitely
The hounds of despair, the hounds of the autumnal wind,

Gnaw with their howling the black echoes of evenings.
The darkness, immensely, gropes in the emptiness
For the moon, seen by the light of water.
From point to point, over there, the distant lights,

And in the sky, above, dreadful voices
Coming and going from the innity of the marshes and planes
To the innity of the valleys and the woods.
And roadways that stretch out like sails

And pass each other, coming unfolded in the distance, soundlessly,
While lengthening beneath the stars,
Through the shadows and the terror of the night.
Fatal Flower
Absurdity grows like a fatal ower

In the leaf-mold of senses, of hearts, and intellects.
Nothing more, neither of heroes nor of new saviours;
And we remain to wallow in native reason.
I wish to wander toward madness and its suns,

The white suns of moonlight, at high noon, bizarre,
And those distant, corroded echoes of clatter
And baying, over there, fraught with vermilion hounds.
Lakes of roses, here, in the snow; cloud,

Where nest those birds with wings of wind;
Caverns of evening, where a golden toad stands guard,
Motionless, as he devours a corner of the landscape.
Beaks of herons, enormously gaping for nothing at all,

Insect in the light, which dgets, immobile,
Gleeful unconsciousness and the feeble tick-tock
Of the peaceful death of madmen, as I hear it well.
Emile Verhaeren 49
Infiniment
Les chiens du dsespoir, les chiens du vent dautomne

Mordent de leurs abois les chos noirs des soirs,
Et lombre, immensment, dans le vide, ttonne
Vers la lune, mire au clair des abreuvoirs.
De point en point, l-bas, des lumires lointaines

Et dans le ciel, l-haut, de formidables voix
Allant de linni des marais et des plaines
Jusques linni des vallons et des bois.
Et des routes qui stendent comme des voiles

Et se croisent et se dplient au loin, sans bruit,
Et continuent sallonger sous les toiles
A travers la tnbre et leffroi de la nuit.
Fleur Fatale
Labsurdit grandit comme une eur fatale

Dans le terreau des sens, des coeurs et des cerveaux.
Plus rien, ni des hros, ni des sauveurs nouveaux;
Et nous restons croupir dans la raison natale.
Je veux marcher vers la folie et les soleils,

Ses blancs soleils de lune au grand midi, bizarres,
Et ses lointains chos mordus de tintamarres
Et daboiements, l-bas, et pleins de chiens vermeils.
Lacs de roses, ici, dans la neige, nuage

O nichent des oiseaux dans des plumes de vent;
Grottes de soir, avec un crapaud dor devant,
Et qui ne bouge et mange un coin de paysage.
Becs de hrons, normment ouverts pour rien,

Mouche, dans un rayon, qui sagite, immobile:
Linconscience gaie et le tic-tac dbile
De la tranquille mort des fous, je lentends bien!
To Die
An evening overowing with purples and red rivers

Grows rotten far above the dwarfed planes,
And forcefully, with the sts of its clouds,
Crushes, upon the greenish horizons, all of the suns.
Massive season! And like October, which with indolence
And heedlessness, swells and dies in this scene,
Apples! pears of re! grapes! golden rosaries,
Which a tremulous ngering of light caresses,
One nal time, before the winter. The ight
Of great ravens? it will come. But now is the hour
Still of leafage carved in lacquerand the proudest.
Shoots of strawberries stain the ground with blood,

The forest stretches toward the sky its hands of russet leaves,
While bronze and iron resound, far away, in the distance;
An odor of still water mingles with the scent of quince,
And perfumes of wild iris with perfumes of moss.
The pond, at, luminous, enormously reects,
Between lithe birch trees with branches stirring,
The climbing moon, heavy, red, immense,
And which seems a lovely, ripe fruit, placidly come to light.
Thus to die, my body, thus to die would be the dream!

Beneath a supreme rush of colors and songs,
And all of the golds and sunsets held within gazes,
And with streams of strength rising within the mind.
To die! like owers far too overblown, to die!
Too massive and too gigantic for life!
Thus would lofty death be superbly served
And our immense pride would suffer no offense!
To die, my body! as does the autumn, to die!
Emile Verhaeren 51
Mourir
Un soir plein de pourpres et de euves vermeils

Pourrit, par au-del des plaines diminues,
Et fortement, avec les poings de ses nues,
Sur lhorizon verdtre, crase des soleils.
Saison massive! Et comme Octobre, avec paresse
Et nonchaloir, se gone et meurt dans ce dcor
Pommes! caillots de feu! raisins! chapelets dor,
Que le doigt tremblant des lumires caresse,
Une dernire fois, avant lhiver. Le vol
Des grands corbeaux? il vient. Mais aujourdhui, cest lheure
Encor des feuillaisons de laqueet la meilleure.
Les pousses des fraisiers ensanglantent le sol,

Le bois tend vers le ciel ses mains de feuilles rousses
Et du bronze et du fer sonnent, l-bas, au loin.
Une odeur deau se mle des senteurs de coing
Et des parfums diris des parfums de mousses.
Et ltang plane et clair rete normment
Entre de ns bouleaux, dont le branchage bouge,
La lune, qui se lve paisse, immense et rouge,
Et semble un beau fruit mr, clos placidement.
Mourir ainsi, mon corps, mourir, serait le rve!

Sous un suprme afux de couleurs et de chants,
Avec, dans les regards, des ors et des couchants,
Avec, dans le cerveau, des rivires de sve.
Mourir! comme des eurs trop normes, mourir!
Trop massives et trop gantes pour la vie!
La grande mort serait superbement servie
Et notre immense orgueil naurait rien souffrir!
Mourir, mon corps, ainsi que lautomne, mourir!
London
In this London of cast-iron and bronze, my soul,

Where slabs of iron clack within shanties,
Where sails depart without Our Lady,
Without stars, through a tepid web of Chances.
Stations of soot and smoke, where gas cries

Its morbid spleen of silver toward tracks of lightening,
Where creatures of tedium yawn at the hour,
Immensely doleful, which tolls at Westminster.
And those boundless wharfs with the lethal shinings,

Withered Fates with spindles plunged into the depths,
And drowned sailors beneath the petals
Of owers grown from muddy entrails, with the glare of a ame.
And the shawls and the gestures of drunken women,

And alcohol in letters of gold up to the rooftops,
And all at once, death steals through the crowded streets,
O my soul of evening, this black London languishing within you.
Madmans Song
from The Hallucinated Countrysides (1893)
The rats from the neighboring graveyard,

As mid-day sounds its din,
Drone in the clamorous bells.
They have gnawed at the hearts of the dead,

And have grown fat and sleek on remorse.
They devour even the worm, which feeds on all things,

And their appetite endures, insatiable, tremendous.
Here are the rats,

Gnawing at the world,
On every side, from top to bottom.
Emile Verhaeren 53
Londres
Et ce Londres de fonte et de bronze, mon me,

O des plaques de fer claquent sous des hangars,
O des voiles sen vont, sans Notre-Dame
Pour toile, sen vont, l-bas, vers les hasards.
Gares de suie et de fume, o du gaz pleure

Ses spleens dargent lointain vers des chemins dclair,
O des btes dennui billent lheure
Dolente immensment, qui tinte Westminster.
Et ces quais innis de lanternes fatales,

Parques dont les fuseaux plongent aux profondeurs,
Et ces marins noys, sous des ptales
De eurs de boue o la amme met des lueurs.
Et ces chles et ces gestes de femmes soles,

Et ces alcools en lettres dor jusques au toit,
Et tout coup la mort parmi ces foules,
O mon me du soir, ce Londres noir qui trane en toi!
Chanson de Fou
Les rats du cimetire proche,

Midi sonnant,
Bourdonnent dans la cloche.
Ils ont mordu le coeur des morts

Et sengraissent de ses remords.
Ils dvorent le ver qui mange tout

Et leur faim dure jusquau bout.
Ce sont des rats

Mangeant le monde
De haut en bas.
And the churchit was once so large and solemn

With the faith of all the paupers within,
And now, it is in shambles,
Since they, the ravenous hordes of rats,
Have gnawed all of the consecrated wafers.
The massive blocks of stone are all stripped bare,

Golden alcoves, like yawning graves,
Open wide to reveal their emptiness;
All of the suggestive glory
Topples from the high pillars and from the apse,
To the signal of a death-knell.
The rats,
They have worn away all the saintly haloes,
The joined hands
Of faith in days after,
The mystical tenderness
In the depth of ecstatic eyes,
And the kisses of prayer
Upon the mouths of poverty;
The rats,
They have stripped, worn away the entire town,
From all sides, like a warehouse.
And now, while they are departing,

The maddened tocsins and cattle-bells,
Are all screaming for pity, screaming for mercy,
Shrieking, high above the roof-tops,
All the way to the bellowing echoes,
But no one at all can hear; there is no one to see:
For the very soul of the elds
Has for a long time been
Blind.
And only the rats from the neighboring graveyard

Remain to chatter with the hiccoughing,
Clattering Angelus of the bell.
Emile Verhaeren 55
Lglise?elle tait large et solennelle

Avec la foi des pauvres gens en elle,
Et la voici anantie
Depuis quils ont, les rats,
Mang lhostie.
Les blocs de granit se dchaussent,

Les niches dor comme des fosses
Sentrouvrent vides;
Toute la gloire vocatoire
Tombe des hauts piliers et des absides
Au son des glas.
Les rats,
Ils ont rong les auroles bnvoles,
Les jointes mains
De la croyance aux lendemains,
Les tendresses mystiques
Au fond des yeux des extatiques
Et les baisers de la prire;
Sur les bouches de la misre;
Les rats,
Ils ont rong le bourg entier
De haut en bas,
Comme un grenier.
Aussi
Que maintenant sen aillent
Les tocsins fous ou les sonnailles
Criant piti, criant merci,
Hurlant, par au del des toits,
Jusquaux chos qui meuglent,
Nul plus nentend et personne ne voit:
Puisquelle est lme des champs,
Pour bien longtemps,
Aveugle.
Et les seuls rats du cimetire proche,

A lAngelus hoquetant et tintant,
Causent avec la cloche.
Tenebrae
A moon, with vacant, chilling eye, stares

At the winter, enthroned vast and white upon the hard ground;
The night is an entire and translucent azure;
The wind, a blade of sudden presence, stabs.
Faraway, on the skylines, the long pathways of frost,

Seem, in the distance, to pierce the expanses,
And stars of gold, suspended to the zenith,
Always higher, amid the ether, to rend the blue of the sky.
The villages crouched in the planes of Flanders,

Near the rivers, the heather, and the great forests,
Between two pale innities, shiver with cold,
Huddled near old hearthsides, where they stir the ashes.
Vesperal
Over marshes of gangrene and bile,

Hearts of pierced stars pour blood from the depth of the sky.
Vast, black forests and black horizon

And clouds of despair,
As they circle in futile voyages through the air,
From North to South, in the closed precinct of sorrow.
Lands of stooped rooftops and seaside hovels,

Where my eyes have set forth as pilgrims,
My vanquished eyes, my eyes deprived of swords,
Like escorts, marching before their dreams.
Leaden lands with endless sewers

And swill brewed from aftertastes
And a spigot of running nausea,
Weeping over cadavers of thoughts.
Emile Verhaeren 57
Tnbres
La lune, avec son oeil vide et glac, regarde

Lhiver rgner immense et blanc sur le sol dur;
La nuit est dun total et translucide azur;
Le vent, comme un couteau, soudain, passe et poignarde.
Aux horizons, l-bas, les longs chemins du gel

Semblent, toujours plus loin, trouer les tendues,
Et les toiles dor jusquau Znith pendues
Parmi lther, toujours plus haut, trouer le ciel.
Les villages blottis dans les plaines de Flandre,

Prs des euves, des bruyres ou des grands bois,
Entre ces deux innis ples, tremblent de froid,
Autour des vieux foyers dont ils remuent la cendre.
Un Soir
Sur des marais de gangrne et de el

Des coeurs dastres trous saignent du fond du ciel.
Horizon noir et grand bois noir

Et nuages de dsespoir
Qui circulent en longs voyages
Du Nord au Sud de ces parages.
Pays de toits baisss et de chaumes marins

O sont alls mes yeux en plerins,
Mes yeux vaincus, mes yeux sans glaives,
Comme escortes, devant leurs rves.
Pays de plombet longs gouts

Et lavasses darrire-gots
En chante-pleure de nauses
Sur des cadavres de penses.
Lands of memories, mired in slime,

Where hatred ows free, decanted,
Lands of dry-rot and leprosy,
Where it is death that resounds in the bells of vespers;
Where death rings out to death,

Darkly, hidden in the depth of a harbor,
From below a steeple, suddenly disinterred,
Like a giant corpse, amid the massive fog;
Where my heart also pours out its blood,

My mournful heart, my benumbed heart,
My heart of gangrene and of bile,
Exhausted star in the depths of the sky.
The Rock
Upon this carious rock, tormented by the sea,

Which footsteps will ever again climb, say, which footsteps?
Say if I will nally be alone and which sustained knell

Will I hear, while standing and facing the sea?
It is there that I constructed my soul.

Say, will I be alone with my soul?
Alas, my soul, mansion of ebony,
Where was slivered, soundlessly, one evening,
The silver-gilt mirror of all my hopes.
Say, will I be left alone with my soul,

In that shadowy and anguished domain?
Will I be left with my dark pride for companion,
While seated in an armchair of hatred?
Will I be left alone with my pale veneration,
Of the holiest virgin, Our Lady of Lunacy?
Will I be left alone with the sea

In this shadowy and anguished domain?
Emile Verhaeren 59
Pays de mmoire chue en de la vase,

O de la haine se transvase,
Pays de la carie et de la lpre,
O cest la mort qui sonne vpre;
O cest la mort qui sonne mort,

Obscurment, du fond dun port,
Au bas dun clocher qui sexhume
Comme un grand mort parmi la brume;
O cest mon coeur qui saigne aussi,

Mon coeur morne, mon coeur transi,
Mon coeur de gangrne et de el,
Astre cass, au fond du ciel.
Le Roc
Sur ce roc cari que fait souffrir la mer,

Quels pas voudront monter encor, dites, quels pas?
Dites, serai-je seul enn et quel long glas

couterai-je debout devant la mer?
Cest l que jai bti mon me.

Dites, serai-je seul avec mon me?
Mon me hlas! maison dbne,
O sest fendu, sans bruit, un soir,
Le grand miroir de mon espoir.
Dites, serai-je seul avec mon me,

En ce nocturne et angoissant domaine?
Serai-je seul avec mon orgueil noir,
Assis en un fauteuil de haine?
Serai-je seul, avec ma ple hyperdulie,
Pour Notre-Dame la Folie?
Serai-je seul avec la mer

En ce nocturne et angoissant domaine?
Croaking black toads, shaggy with moss,

Consume the bright sunlight on the lawns.
A towering pillar, with nothing to support,
Rears up, like a stranger, in a garden path,
Vastly paved with epitaphs in marble.
On a pond of reptiles and wide-staring eyes,

Gatherings of drowned swans,
Toward distances of silk and crushed gold,
Languidly trail their serene suicides,
Amid the freesia and pallid jonquils.
And from the summit of some headland in the air,

Strange cries of sea-faring birds,
With piercing, viperine beaks,
Which sing the demise of all who pass.
Upon this carious rock, hollowed more deeply by the sea,

Say, will I be left alone with my soul?
Will I nally know that atrocious joy

Of seeing, ber by ber, like a prey,
Fierce dementia rending piecemeal my mind?
And will the crazed sufferer, released from the prison

And the hard labor of his reason,
Ever trim the sail for undiscovered lands?
Say, to never again feel your life scaling

The dogged iron steps of every single idea,
To never again hear, endlessly, within,
The screeching, always the same, whether fear or rage,
Toward the great unknown, which journeys in the skies:
To believe in insanity, as if in a faith!
On this carious rock, driven mad by the sea,

To grow old, pitiful dreamer of the steep domain,
With all esh dead and expectation set forth,
Against the grain of life, immense and desolate.
Emile Verhaeren 61
Des crapauds noirs, velus de mousse,

Y dvorent du clair soleil, sur la pelouse.
Un grand pilier ne soutenant plus rien,

Comme un homme, srige en une alle,
Dpitaphes de marbre immensment dalle.
Sur un tang dyeux ouverts et de reptiles,

Des groupes de cygnes noys,
Vers des lointains de soie et dor broys,
Tranent leurs suicides tranquilles
Parmi des phlox et des jonquilles.
Et du sommet dun cap despace,

Dtranges cris doiseaux marins,
Les becs aigus et viprins,
Chantent la mort tel qui passe.
Sur ce roc cari que recreuse la mer,

Dites, serai-je seul avec mon me?
Aurai-je enn latroce joie

De voir, nerfs aprs nerfs, comme une proie,
La dmence attaquer mon cerveau?
Et dtraqu malade, sorti de la prison

Et des travaux forcs de sa raison,
Dappareiller vers un lointain nouveau?
Dites, ne plus sentir sa vie escalade

Par les talons de fer de chaque ide,
Ne plus lentendre inniment en soi
Ce cri, toujours identique, ou crainte, ou rage,
Vers le grand inconnu qui dans les cieux voyage:
Croire en la dmence ainsi quen une foi!
Sur ce roc cari que dtraque la mer,

Vieillir, triste rveur de lescarp domaine,
Les chairs mortes, lesprance en alle,
A rebours de la vie immense et dsole;
To never again hear, hushed within your ebony house,

That iron-clad silence, which causes the dead to tremble with fear;
To drag long, weighted steps through the soundless hallways;
To see the same hours forever marching in succession,
With never a hope for better hours;
And forever to demolish the solitary lookout;

Such a signal in the distance!a presage has just appeared;
Throughout the faded salons, to love the vacant seats
And the chambers, where the large beds have seen death,
And every single evening, to feel with livid ngers,
Unreason growing ripe beneath your temples.
Upon this carious rock, ruined by the sea,

Say, will I nally be alone with the sea,
Say, will I nally be alone with my soul?
And then to die: to once again become nothing.

To be someone who no longer recollects,
And who departs, without a tolling knell,
Without a taper in hand,
Without his knowing, that person who passes,
Joyous and bright, on the smooth surface of the sea,
That the shadowy and anguishing domain,
Where no torch will ever again blaze,
In mourning for its mansion of ebony,
Conceals a corpse and its tombstone.
The Abandoned Port

from The Cities with Pinions (1909)
A pitiful, blind lighthouse, worn away by corrosion,

A few anchors scattered on the deserted pier,
A windlass, rent asunder, useless forever,
And, in the distance, the echoing footstep of a patrol.
Emile Verhaeren 63
Nentendre plus se taire, en sa maison dbne,

Quun silence de fer dont auraient peur les morts;
Traner de longs pas lourds en de sourds corridors;

Voir se suivre toujours les mmes heures,
Sans esprer en des heures meilleures;
Pour jamais clore telle fentre;
Tel signe au loin!un prsage vient dapparatre;
Autour des vieux salons, aimer les siges vides
Et les chambres dont les grands lits ont vu mourir
Et chaque soir, sentir, les doigts livides,
La draison sous ses tempes mrir.
Sur ce roc cari que ruine la mer,

Dites, serai-je seul enn avec la mer,
Dites, serai-je seul enn avec mon me?
Et puis mourir; redevenir rien.

Etre quelquun qui plus ne se souvient
Et qui sen va sans glas qui sonne,
Sans cierge en main ni sans personne,
Sans que sache celui qui passe,
Joyeux et clair dans la bonace,
Que le nocturne et angoissant domaine,
En deuil de sa maison dbne,
O plus ne brle aucun ambeau,
Renferme un mort et son tombeau.
Le Port Dchu
Un pauvre phare aveugle, o mord la rouille;

Quelques ancres sur le mle dsert,
Un cabestan fendu qui plus ne sert,
Et, tout au loin, le pas dune patrouille.
No sailors song throws into confusion

The solid threads of silence, woven in the air,
As the hushed fold return home in even numbers
To their decrepit houses, with bolted doors.
Yet, in a corner of the wharf, still rises,

Battered, groaning at the cruelty of the North Wind,
The likeness of Lady Fortune, sculptured in wood.
But when the moment comes for night to fall,

The water grows tarnished and nds solely reected in its dream
Nothing, until the dawn, but the dead gold of the moon.
Emile Verhaeren 65
Nulle chanson de matelot ne brouille

Les ls du silence tisss dans lair,
Des gens muets rentrent par nombre pair
En des maisons antiques quon verrouille.
Pourtant, au coin du quai, slve encor,

Battue et gmissante au vent du Nord,
Limage, en bois sculpt, de la Fortune.
Mais que vienne linstant o la nuit choit,

Leau se ternit et plus ne mire en soi,
Jusquau matin, que lor mort de la lune.
iii Maurice Maeterlinck
Selections from:
Hothouses
Serres Chaudes
1889
Fifteen Songs
Quinze Chansons
1900
Maurice Maeterlinck (18621949)
Commentary
As a poet, dramatist, and essayist, Maurice Maeterlinck explored the inef-

fable. 1889 marked the appearance of a collection of poetry, Serres
chaudes, and a play, La Princesse Maleine, which created a Symbolist
drama and revolutionized the theater. Maeterlincks early plays, LIntruse, Les
Aveugles, Pellas et Melisande, are characterized by silence, a legendary atmosphere,
anticipation of death as an omnipresent and insinuative force, and anguished,
truncated utterances which express the tension between the spoken and the un-
speakable. Ruptured discourse is also evident in the Serres chaudes poems, in which
Maeterlinck accumulates brief, highly visual situations, momentary ashes of
drama, in order to express a mood of debility and anxiety. Maeterlincks longer
poems are expansive catalogues of displaced objects and conjunctions of oppo-
sites: A fountain rises in the middle of the room, There are deer in a besieged
city, oriental vegetation in an ice-cave. In their brevity, Maeterlincks apos-
trophes are suggestive and open-ended. The ambiguous or absent link between
the statements contributes to their symbolist, evocative quality. An atmosphere of
strangeness is further developed through accretions of sensory confusions, such as
whispering gazes, or suffocated gazes, and conjunctions of the concrete and
abstract, the secret hounds of desires. The Serres chaudes poems are of two types.
There are the aforementioned landscapes of analogies, where hallucinations assail
a prophet of the apocalypse, who reports in rapid succession the bizarre things he
witnesses. Interspersed are more succinct poems, affective and euphonious in their
sound patterns, which are reiterated litanies of waiting and dejection, addressed to
an absent deity. Teeming, mephitic visions and weighted lassitude are the modal-
ities of the Serres chaudes, which convey an impression of an inrm human condi-
tion, man comfortless and powerless in the grasp of an implacable destiny.
The central source of imagery in Maeterlincks Serres chaudes are structures
formed or enclosed in glasshothouses, bell-glasses, diving bells, various transpar-
ent membranes which represent an interior space of the mind or the soul. With its
lush vegetation guarded by invisible yet infrangible walls, the hothouse becomes
Maeterlincks paradigm for the unconscious, the world of dreams which may be
glimpsed, but only imperfectly explored. The various glass structures, protective
yet enclosing, also serve Maeterlinck as metaphors for a state of spiritual claustro-
phobia, the souls impulse to break free of constraints in order to join the un-
known. Related to this impulse are the experiences of entrevoir, entrouvrir,
dimly perceiving, half-opening to the sphere of mystery, alluring yet fearful.
Maurice Maeterlinck 69
Spiritual quest also marks Maeterlincks only other collection of verse, the
Douze Chansons of 1896, expanded to the Quinze Chansons of 1900. The poems are
brief and folkloric, often taking the form of alternating voices engaged in question
and answer. The songs are simple yet highly ambiguous in their reiteration of a
search which remains always undened, always failed, and always continued. Im-
agery of benightedness (blindfolded eyes, blindness, caverns, extinguished
torches), imprisonment (locked doors, lost keys), and sacrice of the meek is re-
current in the songs, which resume in miniature the atmosphere of uncertainty
and helplessness which pervades Maeterlincks theater.
The Poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck:
Posies compltes. Edition critique tablie par Joseph Hanse. (Bruxelles: La Renais-
sance du Livre, 1965).
Oeuvres. (Bruxelles: Jacques Antoine, 1980).
Hothouse
O hothouse lost among the trees,

With your doors forever closed!
As the dead voice, whispering under your dome,
Calls forth the lost days of my soul.
The thoughts of a princess, fainting with hunger,

The distress of a sailor, dreaming of waves in the desert,
Copper music at the windows of those who are slowly dying.
On to the mildest corners!

You would say a woman fainted one harvest day;
There are messengers in the courtyard of the asylum;
In the distance, a bounding huntsman, become a nurse, passes by.
Walk forward by moonlight!

(Oh! nothing is in its place!)
You would say a raving madwoman dragged to trial,
A warship at full sail on a canal,
Nocturnal birds perched on lilies,
A knell resounding about midday,
(Over there, beneath those bells!)
A halting place for the diseased in the meadow,
The smell of ether on a sunny day.
Oh God! Oh God! how we long for rain

And snow and wind in the hothouse!
Nocturnal Orison
Beneath languid visions,

Within my stunned prayers,
I hear the hissing of passions,
And the surging of enemy lusts.
I see a bitter moonlight,

Beneath the nightly tedium of dreams,
And upon poisonous shores,
The wandering pleasures of the esh.
Serre Chaude
O serre au milieu des forts!

Et vos portes jamais closes!
Et tout ce quil y a sous votre coupole!
Et sous mon me en vos analogies!
Les penses dune princesse qui a faim,

Lennui dun matelot dans le dsert,
Une musique de cuivre aux fentres des incurables.
Allez aux angles les plus tides!

On dirait une femme vanouie un jour de moisson;
Il y a des postillons dans la cour de lhospice;
Au loin, passe un chasseur dlans, devenu inrmier.
Examinez au clair de lune!

(Oh rien y est sa place!)
On dirait une folle devant les juges,
Un navire de guerre pleines voiles sur un canal,
Des oiseaux de nuit sur des lys,
Un glas vers midi,
(L-bas sous ces cloches!)
Une tape de malades dans la prairie,
Une odeur dther un jour de soleil.
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! quand aurons-nous la pluie,

Et la neige et le vent dans la serre!
Oraison Nocturne
En mes oraisons endormies

Sous de languides visions,
Jentends jaillir les passions
Et les luxures ennemies.
Je vois un clair de lune amer

Sous lennui nocturne des rves;
Et sur de vnneuses grves,
La joie errante de la chair.
Within my marrow, I hear arising

Desires with green horizons,
And beneath forever murky skies,
I suffer an unquenched thirst for stars.
I hear surging in my house,

Evil, dark caresses;
I see phantom marshes
Beneath an eclipse on the horizons!
And I perish beneath your spite!

Lord, have mercy, O Lord,
Open for the sick man drenched in sweat,
The grass prophesied by the moonlight!
Now is the time, Lord, now is the time,

To scythe the untilled hemlock.
Glimpsed through my most remote hopes,
The moon is tinged green with serpents.
And the tide of evil dreams oats ever onward

With its sins brimming in my eyes,
And I hear the sighs of blue fountain streams
As they climb toward the absolute moon.
Foliage of the Heart
Sealed within the windows of blue crystal

And weary melancholy
My vague, abolished distress
Hovers in the air and slowly grows.
Vegetations of symbols,
Dismal water lilies of past pleasures,
Sluggish palm trees of desires,
Cold moss and slack vines.
Solitary in their midst,

A pale and rigid lily feebly
Raises its motionless ascent
Over the woeful foliage.
Jentends slever dans mes moelles

Des dsirs aux horizons verts,
Et sous des cieux toujours couverts,
Je souffre une soif sans toiles!
Jentends jaillir dans ma maison

Les mauvaises tendresses noires;
Je vois des marais illusoires
Sous une clipse lhorizon!
Et je meurs sous votre rancune!

Seigneur, ayez piti, Seigneur,
Ouvrez au malade en sueur
Lherbe entrevue au clair de lune!
Il est temps, Seigneur, il est temps

De faucher la cigu inculte!
A travers mon espoir occulte
La lune est verte de serpents!
Et le mal des songes afue

Avec ses pchs en mes yeux,
Et jcoute des jets d'eau bleus
Jaillir vers la lune absolue!
Feuillage du Coeur
Sous la cloche de cristal bleu

De mes lasses mlancolies,
Mes vagues douleurs abolies
Simmobilisent peu peu:
Vgtations de symboles,
Nnuphars mornes des plaisirs,
Palmes lentes de mes dsirs,
Mousses froides, lianes molles.
Seul, un lys rige dentre eux,

Ple et rigidement dbile,
Son ascension immobile
Sur les feuillages douloureux,
And in the steps of its light,

Like the moon, little by little,
Lifts up to the closed window
A mystic, white prayer against the blue.
Soul
My soul!
My too much sheltered soul!
And those herds of my desires penned in a hothouse
Awaiting a tempest over the grasslands.
On to the most sickly:

They have strange exhalations.
In their midst, I cross through a battleeld with my mother.
They are burying a comrade-at-arms at noon,
While the sentries eat their meal.
Let us move on to the weakest:

They are drenched in strange sweats;
Here is a sickly ance,
A betrayal on Sunday,
And little children in prison.
(And further on, through the mist,)
Is that a dying woman at a kitchen door?
Or a nun shelling peas at the bedside of an incurable?
Let us go to the saddest at last:

(But at the very end because they are poisonous.)
On! my lips accept a wounded mans kiss!
All of the chatelaines have starved to death, this summer,
in the towers of my soul!
And here is a sunrise that joins in the magic joy!

I confusedly glimpse sheep along the quay,
As the hospital windows are veiled.
There is a long road from my heart to my soul!

And all of the sentries are dead at their post!
Et dans les lueurs quil panche

Comme une lune, peu peu,
Elve vers le cristal bleu
Sa mystique prire blanche.
Ame
Mon me!
O mon me vraiment trop labri!
Et ces troupeaux de mes dsirs dans une serre
Attendant une tempte sur les prairies!
Allons vers les plus malades:

Ils ont dtranges exhalaisons.
Au milieu deux, je traverse un champ de bataille avec ma mre.
On enterre un frre darmes midi,
Tandis que les sentinelles prennent leur repas.
Allons aussi vers les plus faibles:

Ils ont dtranges sueurs;
Voici une ance malade,
Une trahison le dimanche
Et des petits enfants en prison.
(Et plus loin, travers la vapeur,)
Est-ce une mourante la porte dune cuisine?
Ou une soeur pluchant des lgumes au pied du lit dun incurable?
Allons enn vers les plus tristes:

(En dernier lieu, car ils ont des poisons.)
Oh! mes lvres acceptent les baisers dun bless!
Toutes les chtelaines sont mortes de faim, cet t,

dans les tours de mon me!
Voici le petit jour qui entre dans la fte!

Jentrevois des brebis le long des quais,
Et il y a une voile aux fentres de lhpital.
Il y a un long chemin de mon coeur mon me!

Et toutes les sentinelles sont mortes leur poste!
Once, there was a pitiful little holiday on the outskirts of my soul!

They harvested hemlock there one Sunday morning;
And all of the convent virgins watched the ships passing on the
canal, one day of fasting and sunshine,
While the swans suffered under a venomous bridge;
They were chopping down trees around the prison,
They were bringing medicine one June afternoon,
And meals for the sick expand over all the horizons!
My soul!
And the sadness of it all, my soul, and the sadness of it all!
Prayer
You have seen my distress through the dark nights,

Now you know me, my Lord,
And I will carry wretched owers from the ground,
To scatter on a young corpse beneath the sunlight.
You also know my lassitude,

The dimmed moon, the black dawn.
Enrich, oh Lord, my barren solitude,
Watering it with your divine glory.
Open your pathway for me, Lord

And light it for my weary soul,
Because the sadness of my joy
Resembles new life beneath the frozen ground.
Il y eut un jour une pauvre petite fte dans les faubourgs de mon me!
On y fauchait la cigu un dimanche matin;
Et toutes les vierges du couvent regardaient passer les
vaisseaux sur le canal, un jour de jene et de soleil.
Tandis que les cygnes souffraient sous un pont vnneux;
On mondait les arbres autour de la prison,
On apportait des remdes une aprs-midi de Juin,
Et des repas de malades stendaient tous les horizons!
Mon me!
Et la tristesse de tout cela, mon me! et la tristesse de tout cela!
Oraison
Vous savez, Seigneur, ma misre!

Voyez ce que je vous apporte!
Des eurs mauvaises de la terre,
Et du soleil sur une morte.
Voyez aussi ma lassitude,

La lune teinte et laube noire;
Et fcondez ma solitude
En larrosant de votre gloire.
Ouvrez-moi, Seigneur, votre voie,

Eclairez-y mon me lasse,
Car la tristesse de ma joie
Semble de lherbe sous la glace.
Reflections
Beneath the rising water of dream,

My soul is afraid, my soul is afraid,
Of the cold moonbeams in my heart,
And still dream-waters of grey.
Beneath the dull sorrow of reeds,

Only deep reections still breathe,
Of lilies, bright palms, and roses,
Weeping in the depths of dream.
And the owers shed their petals

On the mirror of the sky,
To descend eternally,
Sinking into dreams and lights.
Reflets
Sous leau du songe qui slve,

Mon me a peur, mon me a peur!
Et la lune luit dans mon coeur,
Plong dans les sources du rve.
Sous lennui morne des roseaux,

Seuls les reets profonds des choses,
Des lys, des palmes et des roses,
Pleurent encore au fond des eaux.
Les eurs seffeuillent une une

Sur le reet du rmament,
Pour descendre ternellement
Dans leau du songe et dans la lune.
Fernand Khnopff. Secret-Reection. 1902.

Diving Bell
O diver forever within his bell!

A vast sea of glass eternally warm,
All that motionless life with sluggish green pendulums!
And so many strange beings through the walls!
And all touching forever forbidden!
When there is so much life in the clear water outside!
Look out! the shadow of the great sailing ships glides over
the dahlias of submarine forests;
And, for a moment, I am in the shadow of whales leaving for
the pole!
In the port, others must now be unloading ships full of snow!
There was a glacier in the midst of July meadows!
They swim backwards in the green water of the creek!
They enter dark caverns at noon!
And the breezes of the open sea fan the terraces!
Look out! here are the aming tongues of the Gulf Stream!
Keep their kisses away from the walls of tedium!
They no longer place snow on the foreheads of the feverish!
The sick have lit res of joy
And toss handfuls of green lilies into the ames!
Lean your forehead against the least warm walls,

While waiting for the moon at the top of the bell,
And close your eyes tight to the forests of blue pendulums and
purple albumin,
While remaining deaf to the incitements of the lukewarm water.
Wipe off your desires weakened with perspiration.

Go rst to those on the verge of fainting;
They look as if they were going to celebrate a wedding feast
in a cellar.
They look as if they were going to enter at noon into a
lamplit avenue at the bottom of a vault;
They cross in stately procession a landscape that resembles
an orphans childhood.
Next go to those who are dying.

They arrive like virgins who have had a long stroll in the
sun, one day of fasting;
Cloche Plongeur
O plongeur jamais sous sa cloche!

Toute une mer de verre ternellement chaude!
Toute une vie immobile aux lents pendules verts!
Et tant dtres tranges travers les parois!
Et tout attouchement jamais interdit!
Lorsquil y a tant de vie en leau claire au dehors!
Attention! lombre des grands voiliers passe sur les dahlias

des forts sous-marines;
Et je suis un moment lombre des baleines qui sen vont
vers le ple!
En ce moment, les autres dchargent, sans doute, des vaisseaux
pleins de neige dans le port!
Il y avait encore un glacier au milieu des prairies de Juillet!
Ils nagent reculons en leau verte de lanse!
Ils entrent midi dans des grottes obscures!
Et les brises du large ventent les terrasses!
Attention! voici les langues en amme du Gulf-Stream!

Ecartez leurs baisers des parois de lennui!
On na plus mis de neige sur le front des vreux;
Les malades ont allum un feu de joie,
Et jettent pleines mains les lys verts dans les ammes!
Appuyez votre front aux parois les moins chaudes,

En attendant la lune au sommet de la cloche,
Et fermez bien vos yeux aux forts de pendules bleus et
dalbumines violettes, en restant sourd aux suggestions de
leau tide.
Essuyez vos dsirs affaiblis de sueurs;

Allez dabord ceux qui vont svanouir:
Ils ont lair de clbrer une fte nuptiale dans une cave;
Ils ont lair dentrer midi, dans une avenue claire de
lampes au fond dun souterrain;
Ils traversent, en cortge de fte, un paysage semblable une
enfance dorphelin.
Allez ensuite ceux qui vont mourir.

Ils arrivent comme des vierges qui ont fait une longue
promenade au soleil, un jour de jene;
They are as pale as the ill who listen to the placidly falling
rain in hospital gardens.
They look like survivors who take their meal on the
battleeld;
They are like prisoners who are not unaware that the jailors
are bathing in the river,
And who hear the grass being mown in the prison garden.
Round of Tedium
I intone the wan ballads

Of kisses forevermore lost!
I see weddings of the diseased,
Upon loves thick-sown lawn.
I hear voices in my sleep,

So heedlessly come!
And lilies open in streets,
Without stars, without sun.
And those ights so slow still,

And those desires that I willed,
Are paupers in a palace,
And candles weary in the dawn.
I await the moon in my eyes,

Opened on the verge of ceaseless nights;
May she nally stanch my dreams,
With her cloths, so indolent and blue.
Ils sont ples comme des malades qui coutent pleuvoir

placidement sur des jardins de lhpital;
Ils ont laspect de survivants qui djeunent sur le champ de
bataille.
Ils sont pareils des prisonniers qui nignorent pas que tous
les geliers se baignent dans le euve,
Et qui entendent faucher lherbe dans le jardin de la prison.
Ronde dEnnui
Je chante les ples ballades

Des baisers perdus sans retour!
Sur lherbe paisse de lamour
Je vois des noces de malades.
Jentends des voix dans mon sommeil

Si nonchalamment apparues!
Et des lys souvrent en des rues
Sans toiles et sans soleil.
Et ces lans si lents encore

Et ces dsirs que je voulais,
Sont des pauvres dans un palais,
Et des cierges las dans laurore.
Jattends la lune dans mes yeux

Ouverts au seuil des nuits sans trves,
An quelle tanche mes rves
Avec ses linges lents et bleus.
Touches
Touches!
Darkness expands between your ngers!
Brass music beneath the storm!
Organ music in the sun!
All of the souls herds lost in a night of eclipse!
All of the sea salt in the grass of the meadows!
And those blue reballs on all of the horizons!
(Have pity upon this power of mankind!)
But those touches of your weak, damp hands!
I hear your pure ngers slipping between my ngers,
And streams of sheep ow in the moonlight along a warm river.
I recall all of the hands that have touched my hands.

I see once again all that was out of reach of those hands,
And I see today that I was sheltered from those lukewarm hands.
I often became the pauper who eats bread at the foot of the throne.
I was sometimes the diver who can no longer escape from the warm water!
I was sometimes an entire people who could no longer leave the outskirts!
And those hands like a convent without a garden!
And those that shut me in like a throng of sick people in a
glass house on a day of rain!
Until others, cooler, came to half-open the doors,
And sprinkle a little water on the threshold!
Oh! I have known strange touches!

And now they hem me in forever!
They were giving alms on a sunny day,
People harvested at the bottom of a crypt,
There was the music of mountebanks all around the prison,
There were wax gures in a summer forest,
Elsewhere the moon mowed down an entire oasis,
And sometimes I happened upon a feverish virgin at the bottom
of a cavern of ice.
Have pity upon the strange hands!

Those hands hold the secrets of all the kings!
Attouchements
Attouchements!
Lobscurit stend entre vos doigts!
Musiques de cuivres sous lorage!
Musiques dorgues au soleil!
Tous les troupeaux de lme au fond dune nuit dclipse!
Tout le sel de la mer en lherbe des prairies!
Et ces bolides bleus tous les horizons!
(Ayez piti de ce pouvoir de lhomme!)
Mais ces attouchements plus mornes et plus las!
O ces attouchements de vos pauvres mains moites!
Jcoute vos doigts purs passer entre mes doigts,
Et des troupeaux dagneaux sloignent au clair de lune le long
dun euve tide.
Je me souviens de toutes les mains qui ont touch mes mains.

Et je revois ce quil y avait labri de ces mains,
Et je vois aujourdhui ce que jtais labri de ces mains tides.
Je devenais souvent le pauvre qui mange du pain au pied du trne.
Jtais parfois le plongeur qui ne peut plus svader de leau chaude!
Jtais parfois tout un peuple qui ne pouvait plus sortir des faubourgs!
Et ces mains semblables un couvent sans jardin!
Et celles qui menfermaient comme une troupe de malades dans

une serre un jour de pluie!
Jusqu ce que dautres plus fraches vinssent entrouvrir les portes
Et rpandre un peu deau sur le seuil!
Oh! jai connu dtranges attouchements!

Et voici quils mentourent jamais!
On y faisait laumne un jour de soleil,

On y faisait la moisson au fond dun souterrain,
Il y avait une musique de saltimbanques autour de la prison,
Il y avait des gures de cire dans une fort dt,
Ailleurs la lune avait fauch toute loasis,
Et parfois je trouvais une vierge en sueur au fond dune grotte de glace.
Ayez piti des mains tranges!

Ces mains contiennent les secrets de tous les rois!
Have pity upon hands too pale!

They seem to issue from the cellars of the moon,
They have worn themselves out spinning the spindle of fountain cascades!
Have pity upon hands too white and damp!

It seems to me that all summer long the princesses went to
sleep toward midday.
Stay away from hands too hard!

They seem to have sprung from rocks!
But have pity upon cold hands!
I see a heart bleeding beneath ribs of ice!
Have pity upon wicked hands!
They have poisoned the fountains!
They have placed the young swans in a nest of hemlock!
I have seen the pagan angels parting the doors at noon!

Only madmen are left on a poisonous river!
There are only black sheep in pastures without stars!
And the lambs stray to graze on darkness!
But those cool and loyal hands!

They come to offer ripe fruit to the dying!
They carry clear and cold water in their palms!
They sprinkle the battleelds with milk!
They seem to issue from wonderful forests, forever virgin!
Ayez piti des mains trop ples!

Elles semblent sortir des caves de la lune,
Elles se sont uses ler le fuseau des jets deau!
Ayez piti des mains trop blanches et trop moites!

Il me semble que les princesses sont alles se coucher vers
midi tout lt!
Eloignez-vous des mains trop dures!

Elles semblent sortir des rochers!
Mais ayez piti des mains froides!
Je vois un coeur saigner sous des ctes de glace!
Ayez piti des mains mauvaises!
Elles ont empoisonn les fontaines!
Elles ont mis les jeunes cygnes dans un nid de cigu!
Jai vu les mauvais anges ouvrir les portes midi!

Il ny a que des fous sur un euve vnneux!
Il ny a plus que des brebis noires en des pturages sans toiles!
Et les agneaux sen vont brouter lobscurit!
Mais ces mains fraches et loyales!

Elles viennent offrir des fruits mrs aux mourants!
Elles apportent de leau claire et froide en leurs paumes!
Elles arrosent de lait les champs de bataille!
Elles semblent sortir dadmirables forts ternellement vierges!
Bell-Glasses
O bells of glass!
Uncanny plants forever sheltered!
While outside the crystal partitions, the wind stirs my senses!
An entire valley of the soul, forever motionless!
And so much mildness shut in toward midday!
And the strange images perceived through the crystal panes!
Never raise any of them!

Several have been placed over ancient moonlight!
Part the foliage and search.
You might nd that there is a beggar seated on a throne,
One senses that pirates are lurking on the pond
And that antediluvian beings will soon assail the cities.
Some have been placed over ancient snow-storms,

Some enclose by-gone rains.
(Have pity upon the heavy, stiing air.)
I hear a raucous celebration on a Sunday of famine,
There is an ambulance in the midst of the harvest,
And all of the kings daughters ramble, one fasting day,
through the meadows.
And especially search those glaring on the skylines!

They cover with care the ancient tempests.
Oh! somewhere a eet must be aoat on a swamp!
I would swear that the swans have found young ravens in their nests!
(A gaze can barely pierce the clouded glass.)
A virgin sprinkles the ferns with hot water.

A ock of little girls stares at the hermit in his cell,
My sisters drift into sleep at the heart of a poisonous cavern!
Let us wait now for the moon and a white winter,

To cover at last these bells, scattered over the ice.
Cloches De Verre
O cloches de verre!
Etranges plantes jamais labri!
Tandis que le vent agite mes sens au dehors!
Toute une valle de lme jamais immobile!
Et la tideur enclose vers midi!
Et les images entrevues eur du verre!
Nen soulevez jamais aucune!

On en a mis plusieurs sur danciens clairs de lune.
Examinez travers leurs feuillages:
Il y a peut-tre un vagabond sur le trne,
On a lide que des corsaires attendent sur ltang,
Et que des tres antdiluviens vont envahir les villes.
On en a plac sur danciennes neiges.

On en a plac sur de vieilles pluies.
(Ayez piti de latmosphre enclose!)
Jentends clbrer une fte un dimanche de famine,
Il y a une ambulance au milieu de la moisson,
Et toutes les lles du roi errent, un jour de dite,
travers les prairies!
Examinez surtout celles de lhorizon!

Elles couvrent avec soin de trs anciens orages.
Oh! Il doit y avoir quelque part une norme otte sur un marais!
Et je crois que les cygnes ont couv des corbeaux!

(On entrevoit peine travers les moiteurs)
Une vierge arrose deau chaude les fougres,

Une troupe de petites lles observe lermite en sa cellule,
Mes soeurs sont endormies au fond dune grotte vnneuse!
Attendez la lune et lhiver,

Sur ces cloches parses enn sur la glace!
Weary Hunts
Today, my soul languishes,

Ill with distress and absence,
Diseased with darkness and silence,
And my eyes ash without horizons.
Today, I perceive frozen hunts,

Beneath the blue whips of memories,
And the secret hounds of desire,
Course along the weary slopes.
I see the packs of my dreams,

Through the dimness of warm trees,
And toward the white stags of lies,
The yellow arrows of regrets.
God, my agonizing wishes,

The warm longings of all I can see,
Have faded into a panting blue,
The new moon on the hill, my soul.
Gazes
O those gazes wretched and weary!

And yours and mine!
And those that are no longer and those still to come!
And those that will never arrive and yet exist!
Some seem to visit paupers on Sunday;
Some are like the homeless ill;
Some are like lambs in a meadow covered with washing.
And those strange gazes!
Under the vault of some, you watch virgins put to death
in a sealed chamber;
And some make you dream of unknown sorrows!
Of peasants under the factory windows,

Of a gardener become a weaver,
Of a sultry afternoon in a wax museum,
Of a queens thoughts as she watches a sick man in the garden,
Chasses Lasses
Mon me est malade aujourdhui,

Mon me est malade dabsences,
Mon me a le mal des silences,
Et mes yeux lclairent dennui.
Jentrevois dimmobiles chasses,

Sous les fouets bleus des souvenirs,
Et les chiens secrets des dsirs
Passent le long des pistes lasses.
A travers de tides forts,

Je vois les meutes de mes songes,
Et vers les cerfs blancs des mensonges,
Les jaunes ches des regrets.
Mon Dieu, mes dsirs hors dhaleine,

Les tides dsirs de mes yeux,
Ont voil de soufes trop bleus
La lune dont mon me est pleine.
Regards
O ces regards pauvres et las!

Et les vtres et les miens!
Et ceux qui ne sont plus et ceux qui vont venir!
Et ceux qui narriveront jamais et qui existent cependant!
Il y en a qui semblent visiter des pauvres un dimanche;
Il y en a comme des malades sans maison;
Il y en a comme des agneaux dans une prairie couverte de linges.
Et ces regards insolites!
Il y en a sous la vote desquels on assite lexcution
dune vierge dans une salle close,
Et ceux qui font songer des tristesses ignores!
A des paysans aux fentres de lusine,

A un jardinier devenu tisserand,
A une aprs-midi dt dans un muse de cires,
Aux ides dune reine qui regarde un malade dans le jardin,
Of the smell of camphor in a forest,

Of locking a princess in a tower, some feast day,
Of navigating an entire week on a warm canal.
Have mercy upon those that set forth with tottering steps like
a convalescent during harvest!
Have mercy upon those that look like lost children at the time
for repast!
Have mercy upon the gaze of the wounded man at the surgeon,
Like tents buffeted by a storm!
Have mercy upon the gazes of an enticed virgin!
(Oh! the rivers of milk have ed into the shadows!
And the swans are dead in the midst of serpents!)
And those of a virgin who succumbs!

Princesses abandoned in swamps without escape!
And those eyes where ships leave at full sail, lit by a storm!
And the wretchedness of all of those eyes which suffer from not
being elsewhere!
And so much suffering, almost indistinct and yet so manifold!
And those that no one can ever understand!
And those poor gazes almost mute!
And those poor gazes that whisper!
And those poor, suffocated gazes!
In the midst of some, you imagine yourself in a castle become a

hospital!
And so many others look like tents, battle lilies on a little
convent lawn!
And so many others like sisters of charity on a yacht without
the ill!
Ah! to have seen all of those gazes!

To have recognized all of those gazes!
And to have worn out my own seeking them!
And from now on never again to be able to close my eyes!
A une odeur de camphre dans la fort,

A enfermer une princesse dans une tour, un jour de fte,
A naviguer toute une semaine sur un canal tide.
Ayez piti de ceux qui sortent petits pas comme des

convalescents dans la moisson!
Ayez piti de ceux qui ont lair denfants gars lheure
du repas!
Ayez piti des regards du bless vers le chirurgien,
Pareils des tentes sous lorage!
Ayez piti des regards de la vierge tente!
(Oh! des euves de lait ont fui dans les tnbres!
Et les cygnes sont morts au milieu des serpents!)
Et de ceux de la vierge qui succombe!

Princesses abandonnes en des marcages sans issues!
Et ces yeux o sloignent pleines voiles des navires
illumins dans la tempte!
Et le pitoyable de tous ces regards qui souffrent de ntre pas
ailleurs!
Et tant de souffrances presque indistinctes et si diverses cependant!
Et ceux que nul ne comprendra jamais!
Et ces pauvres regards presque muets!
Et ces pauvres regards qui chuchotent!
Et ces pauvres regards touffs!
Au milieu des uns on croit tre dans un chteau qui sert

dhpital!
Et tant dautres ont lair de tentes, lys des guerres, sur la
petite pelouse du couvent!
Et tant dautres ont lair de blesss soigns dans une serre
chaude!
Et tant dautres ont lair de soeurs de charit sur une
Atlantique sans malades!
Oh! avoir vu tous ces regards!

Avoir admis tous ces regards!
Et avoir puis les miens leur rencontre!
Et dsormais ne pouvoir plus fermer les yeux!
Amen
At last has come the hour to bless

The extinguished sleep of the slaves,
And I await the coming of his hands,
White roses in the cellars.
I await at last the coolness of his breath

Upon my heart, at last sealed to deceit,
Paschal lamb lost in the marshes,
And wound sunk in warm water.
I await nights without days after,

And weaknesses without remedy,
I await his shadow on my hands,
And his image in the lukewarm water.
I await your nights, at last to see

My desire washing its face,
And my dreams in the evening bath,
Dying in a palace of ice.
Hospital
Hospital! Hospital alongside the canal!

Hospital in the month of July!
They are lighting a re in the ward!
While ocean liners whistle on the canal!
(Dont go too close to the windows!)
Emigrants are walking through a palace!
I see a yacht in a storm!
I see herds on all the ships!
(It is much better to keep the windows closed,
We are almost safe from the outside.)
The thought of a hothouse upon snow comes to mind,
You would think they were celebrating a recovery on a stormy day.
You glimpse plants scattered over a woolen blanket,
And a re on a sunny day,
And I cross through a forest teeming with the wounded.
Amen
Il est lheure enn de bnir

Le sommeil teint des esclaves,
Et jattends ses mains venir
En roses blanches dans les caves.
Jattends enn son soufe frais,

Sur mon coeur enn clos aux fraudes;
Agneau-pascal dans les marais,
Et blessure au fond des eaux chaudes.
Jattends des nuits sans lendemains,

Et des faiblesses sans remde;
Jattends son ombre sur mes mains,
Et son image dans leau tide.
Jattends vos nuits an de voir

Mes dsirs se laver la face,
Et mes songes aux bains du soir,
Mourir en un palais de glace.
Hpital
Hpital! hpital au bord du canal!

Hpital au mois de Juillet!
On y fait du feu dans la salle!
Tandis que les transatlantiques sifent sur le canal!
(Oh! napprochez pas des fentres!)
Des migrants traversent un palais!
Je vois un yacht sous la tempte!
Je vois des troupeaux sur tous les navires!
(Il vaut mieux que les fentres restent closes,
On est presque labri du dehors.)
On a lide dune serre sur la neige,
On croit clbrer des relevailles un jour dorage,
On entrevoit des plantes parses sur une couverture de laine,
Il y a un incendie un jour de soleil,
Et je traverse une fort pleine de blesss.
At last the moonlight appears!
A fountain rises in the middle of the room!

A group of little girls parts the door a crack!
I see lambs on an island of meadows!
And beautiful plants on a glacier!
And lilies in a marble hall!
There is a feast in a virgin forest!
And oriental vegetation in an ice-cave!
Listen! They are opening the dams!

And ocean liners swell the water of the canals!
But the sister of charity is stoking the re!
All of the beautiful green reeds on the banks are aame!

A ship full of the wounded tosses on moonlight!
All of the kings daughters are on a barge in the storm!
And the princesses will die in a eld of hemlock!
Oh! Dont unseal the windows!

Listen! the ocean liners still whistle on the horizon!
Someone is being poisoned in the garden!

They are having a great festivity at the enemies!
There are deer in a besieged city!
And a zoo in the midst of lilies!

There is tropical vegetation in the depths of a coalpit!
And a herd of lambs crosses an iron bridge!
And the sheep sadly stray from the meadow into the room!
Now the sister of charity is lighting the lamps,

She is bringing the sick peoples meals,
She has shut the windows overlooking the canal,
And all of the doors are barred to the moonlight.
Oh! voici enn le clair de lune!
Un jet deau slve au milieu de la salle!

Une troupe de petites lles entrouvre la porte!
Jentrevois des agneaux dans une le de prairies!
Et de belles plantes sur un glacier!
Et des lys dans un vestibule de marbre!
Il y a un festin dans une fort vierge!
Et une vgtation orientale dans une grotte de glace!
Ecoutez! on ouvre les cluses!

Et les transatlantiques agitent leau du canal!
Oh! mais la soeur de charit attisant le feu!
Tous les beaux roseaux verts des berges sont en ammes!

Un bateau de blesss ballotte au clair de lune!
Toutes les lles du roi sont dans une barque sous lorage!
Et les princesses vont mourir en un champ de cigus!
Oh! nentrouvrez pas les fentres!

Ecoutez: les transatlantiques sifent encore lhorizon!
On empoisonne quelquun dans un jardin!

Ils clbrent une grande fte chez les ennemis!
Il y a des cerfs dans une ville assige!
Et une mnagerie au milieu des lys!

Il y a une vgtation tropicale au fond dune houillre!
Un troupeau de brebis traverse un pont de fer!
Et les agneaux de la prairie entrent tristement dans la salle!
Maintenant la soeur de charit allume les lampes,

Elle apporte le repas des malades,
Elle a clos les fentres sur le canal,
Et toutes les portes au clair de lune.
Hothouse of Boredom
Blue tedium lls my heart,

As a pale moon cries, shining behind clouds,
Illuminating the far reaches of the skies,
And my dreams, so blue with langour.
This tedium, blue as the hothouse,

Where enclosed, one dimly perceives,
Through panes, profound and almost green,
Clothed with moonlight and sad earth,
The high vegetation

Stretching its nocturnal web of oblivion,
Silently still as a dream,
Above the red roses of all passions.
Where water very slowly rises,

Mingling with the moon and the far reaches of the sky,
In glaucous, eternal tears,
Monotonously, like a dream.
Afternoon
My eyes have ensnared my soul,

Oh God, let drift, oh God,
Some leaves upon the silent snow,
Some snow upon the bright re.
Sunlight warms my pillow,
As the same hours always toll,
And my gazes will heap ower-petals,
Upon dying women who reap in the elds . . .
While my hands gather only withered grass,
And my eyes tarnished with sleep
Are like the sickly yearning for cooling drink,
Or cellar owers exposed to the sun.
I await the relief of water upon the lawn,

And upon my motionless dreams
As my gazes on all of the horizons
Follow ocks streaming into the cities.
Serre dEnnui
O cet ennui bleu dans le coeur!

Avec la vision meilleure,
Dans le clair de lune qui pleure,
De mes rves bleus de langueur!
Cet ennui bleu comme la serre,

O lon voit closes travers
Les vitrages profonds et verts,
Couvertes de lune et de terre,
Les grandes vgtations

Dont loubli nocturne sallonge,
Immobilement comme un songe,
Sur les roses des passions;
O de leau trs lente slve,

En mlant la lune et le ciel
En un sanglot glauque ternel,
Monotonement comme un rve.
Aprs-midi
Mes yeux ont pris mon me au pige,

Mon Dieu, laissez tomber, mon Dieu,
Un peu de feuilles sur la neige,
Un peu de neige sur le feu.
Jai du soleil sur loreiller,
Toujours les mmes heures sonnent;
Et mes regards vont seffeuiller
Sur des mourantes qui moissonnent . . .
Mes mains cueillent de lherbe sche,
Et mes yeux ternis de sommeil
Sont des malades sans eau frache,
Et des eurs de cave au soleil.
Jattends de leau sur le gazon

Et sur mes songes immobiles,
Et mes regards lhorizon
Suivent des agneaux dans les villes.
Soul of Night
My soul overows with sadness in the end,

She is weighted with the sadness of being weary,
With the weariness nally of being in vain,
She is sad and weary in the end,
And I await your hands upon my face.
I await your pure ngers upon my face,

The caresses of angels of ice,
I wait for them to bring me the ring,
I await their coolness upon my face,
Like a treasure sunk in water.
And I await at last their remedies,

Not to perish in the sunlight,
To perish hopelessly in the sunlight!
I wait for them to bathe my tepid eyes,
Where so many paupers sigh for sleep!
Where so many swans on the sea,

Swans lost, adrift on the sea,
Stretch in vain their sullen throats,
Where the dying wander through winter gardens,
Gathering the last hope of roses.
I await your pure ngers upon my face,

The caresses of angels of ice,
I wait for them to moisten my gazes,
The sear grass of my eyes,
Where so many weary lambs are astray.
And if he were ever to return

from Fifteen Songs
And if he were ever to return

What should one say?
Tell him that one longed for him
To the point of dying . . .
Ame de Nuit
Mon me en est triste la n;

Elle est triste enn dtre lasse,
Elle est lasse enn dtre en vain,
Elle est triste et lasse la n
Et jattends vos mains sur ma face.
Jattends vos doigts purs sur ma face,

Pareils des anges de glace,
Jattends quils mapportent lanneau;
Jattends leur fracheur sur ma face,
Comme un trsor au fond de leau.
Et jattends enn leurs remdes,

Pour ne pas mourir au soleil,
Mourir sans espoir au soleil!
Jattends quils lavent mes yeux tides
O, tant de pauvres ont sommeil!
O tant de cygnes sur la mer,

De cygnes errants sur la mer,
Tendent en vain leur col morose,
O, le long des jardins dhiver,
Des malades cueillent des roses.
Jattends vos doigts purs sur ma face,

Pareils des anges de glace,
Jattends quils mouillent mes regards,
Lherbe morte de mes regards,
O tant dagneaux las sont pars!
Et sil revenait un jour
Et sil revenait un jour

Que faut-il lui dire?
Dites-lui quon lattendit
Jusqu sen mourir . . .
And if he questions me still

Without recognizing me?
Speak to him like a sister,
He suffers perhaps . . .
And if he asks where you are

What is one to say?
Give him my golden ring
Without saying a word . . .
And if he wants to know why

The room is empty?
Show him the extinguished lamp
And the open door . . .
And if he questions me then

About the last hour?
Tell him that I smiled
For fear that he might cry . . .
They killed three sweet little girls

from Fifteen Songs
They killed three sweet little girls

To see what was in their hearts.
The rst was full of great glee,

And wherever her blood owed,
Three serpents would hiss three years.
The second was full of meekness,

Three sad sheep bleated three years.
Then the third was full of sorrow,

Three archangels stood guard three years.
Et sil minterroge encore

Sans me reconnatre?
Parlez-lui comme une soeur,
Il souffre peut-tre . . .
Et sil demande o vous tes

Que faut-il rpondre?
Donnez-lui mon anneau dor
Sans rien lui rpondre . . .
Et sil veut savoir pourquoi

La salle est dserte?
Montrez-lui la lampe teinte
Et la porte ouverte . . .
Et sil minterroge alors

Sur la dernire heure?
Dites-lui que jai souri
De peur quil ne pleure . . .
Ils ont tu trois petites filles
Ils ont tu trois petites lles

Pour voir ce quil y a dans leur coeur.
Le premier tait plein de bonheur,

Et partout o coula son sang,
Trois serpents sifrent trois ans.
Le deuxime tait plein de douceur,

Trois agneaux broutrent trois ans.
Le troisime tait plein de malheur,

Trois archanges veillrent trois ans.
You have lit the lamps

from Fifteen Songs
You have lit the lamps,

Oh! the sunlight in the garden!
You have lit the lamps,
I see sunshine through the chinks,
Open the doors to the garden!
The keys to the doors are lost,

We must wait, we must wait,
The keys have fallen from the tower,
We must wait, we must wait,
We must await other days . . .
Other days will open the doors,

The forest guards their locks,
The forest around us is ablaze,
It is the brightness of dead leaves
That blazes on all the doorsills.
Other days are already weary,

Other days are also afraid,
Other days will never come,
Other days will also die,
And we will die here also . . .
Canticle of the Virgin

from Fifteen Songs
For every soul that weeps,

And every sin that fades,
I open in the depth of stars,
My hands full of grace.
No sin can survive

When love has spoken;
No soul can die
When love has wept . . .
Vous avez allum les lampes
Vous avez allum les lampes,

Oh! le soleil dans le jardin!
Vous avez allum les lampes,
Je vois le soleil par les fentes,
Ouvrez les portes du jardin!
Les clefs des portes sont perdues,

Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,
Les clefs sont tombes de la tour,
Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,
Il faut attendre dautres jours . . .
Dautres jours ouvriront les portes,

La fort garde les verrous,
La fort brle autour de nous,
Cest la clart des feuilles mortes,
Qui brlent sur le seuil des portes . . .
Les autres jours sont dj las,

Les autres jours ont peur aussi,
Les autres jours ne viendront pas,
Les autres jours mourront aussi,
Nous aussi nous mourrons ici . . .
Cantique de la Vierge
A toute me qui pleure

A tout pch qui passe
Jouvre au sein des toiles
Mes mains pleines de grces.
Il nest pch qui vive

Quand lamour a parl
Il nest me qui meure
Quand lamour a pleur. . .
And if love goes astray,

On pathways here below,
Its tears will nd me,
And will never be lost . . .
I have searched thirty years

from Fifteen Songs
I have searched thirty years, my sisters,

Where can he have hidden?
I have walked thirty years, my sisters,
Without coming any nearer . . .
I have walked thirty years, my sisters,

And my feet are weary,
He was everywhere, my sisters,
And does not exist . . .
The mournful hour now comes, my sisters,

Remove my sandals.
The evening must also die, my sisters,
And my soul is ill . . .
You are sixteen years old, my sisters,

Go far from here,
Take up the pilgrims staff, my sisters,
And you shall search like me . . .
Et si lamour sgare
Aux sentiers dici-bas
Ses larmes me retrouvent
Et ne sgarent pas . . .
Jai cherch trente ans, mes soeurs
Jai cherch trente ans, mes soeurs,

O sest-il cach?
Jai march trente ans, mes soeurs,
Sans men rapprocher . . .
Jai march trente ans, mes soeurs,

Et mes pieds sont las,
Il tait partout, mes soeurs,
Et nexiste pas . . .
Lheure est triste enn, mes soeurs,

Otez mes sandales,
Le soir meurt aussi, mes soeurs,
Et mon me a mal . . .
Vous avez seize ans, mes soeurs,

Allez loin dici,
Prenez mon bourdon, mes soeurs,
Et cherchez aussi . . .
iv The Young Belgians
Selections from the poetry of:

Max Waller
Albert Giraud
Valre Gille
Iwan Gilkin
Georges Khnopff
Jean Delville
Georges Marlow
Fernand Sverin
Gregoire Le Roy
Albert Mockel
Marcel Wyseur
Andr Fontainas
The Young Belgians
Commentary
The 1880s mark the beginning of an extraordinary eforescence of

poetry in Belgium, effected by a group of ardent young writers who
sought to cultivate their individuality and artistic integrity, their national
identity, but also close ties with the internationalism of the Symbolist movement
in Paris. Soyons nous-mmes, Let us be ourselves, was the motto of La Jeune
Belgique, the Brussels-based literary journal founded in 1881 and published until
1897. To be ourselves did not mean to be delimited, closed and provincial, but to
be aware of the modern currents of philosophy and aesthetics, open to the vitality
and fervor of the symbolist poetic renewal which was taking place in Paris. Thus,
the journal, La Wallonie, published in Lige for a seven year period, 18861893, had
an important readership in France and presented works by Mallarm and Verlaine,
as well as by Verhaeran, Maeterlinck, Elskamp, and Lerberghe. There was great
and often bitter rivalry between the literary journals, but the aesthetic quarrels are
symptomatic of the intensity of poetic creation in Belgium at the turn of the cen-
tury. Stylistic and thematic diversity characterizes the outpouring of this period of
literary resurgence and emancipation. The young Belgians gave expression to their
inner experience, each in a manner true to his own muse and the spirit of the time.
Max Waller (18601889)
Max Waller was the founder of La Jeune Belgique. His original program
was Art for Art, a severance from the social preoccupations and political
ideology which characterized Belgian literary reviews of the period.
Between 1881 and 1886, La Jeune Belgique was decidedly non-conformist in tone,
welcoming a variety of styles. It was during these years that Rodenbach and Ve-
rhaeren were major contributors. After 1887, the journal became biased toward a
parnassian clarity of style, causing many writers to give their allegiance to La Wal-
lonie, more accepting of symbolist innovations.
Max Waller was a rallying gure, convinced of the need for a strong Belgian
presence in the literary innovations of the time. His charisma as an editor has
eclipsed his considerable promise as a poet. Its Raining and Love-Hotel are
tender, sensual, and gently ironic examples of carpe diem. Perhaps the brevity of
Wallers life lends in retrospect a poignant quality to these knowing pleas for amor-
ous freedom. Max Wallers poems appeared in the 1887 Parnasse de la Jeune Bel-
gique, an anthology which introduced Maeterlinck and Lerberghe.
Its Raining
from Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique (1887)
Its raining, hurry over, my love,

And well chat away by the reside;
The grey sky will seem blue
In your eyes full of light.
Well toss out words at random,

Like a wind of starlight,
And then the sky will turn bright
Upon your hair, curled with gold.
Well again kiss,

Like the other evening.
My passion will be so feverish
That the sky will seem to shine.
And in this night of infamy,

Where evil thunders outside,
Well just nestle in a corner,
Very close to each other, my love.
Well tell the sky that its lying,

Well forget how much its raining,
Lost in sweet dreams, which cradle us,
Gently exalting us.
Come, my sweet, come, now is the time,

When the respectable are working hard,
For our sins will be pardoned,
And well laugh, since the sky is crying.
Love-Hotel
My heart is like a grand hotel,

Where my darlings come to stay a while,
And pasted on their suitcases, closed tight,
A ight of little Cupids, in pastel.
Max Waller 113
Il Pleut
Il pleut, accourez ma mignonne,

Nous jacasserons prs du feu,
Et le ciel gris paratra bleu
Dans votre regard qui rayonne!
Nous nous dirons des mots en lair,

Des mots vifs comme des fuses,
Et le ciel noir paratra clair
Dans vos chres boucles frises!
Nous nous embrasserons encor

Comme lautre soir, sur les lvres,
Et si folles seront nos vres
Que laffreux ciel paratra dor!
Et dans cette nuit dinfamie

O des crimes hurlent au loin,
Nous nous blottirons dans un coin,
Tout prs lun de lautre, mamie.
Nous dirons ce ciel quil ment

Nous oublierons quil pleut verse,
Plongs dans un rve qui berce
Et qui grise adorablement.
Viens, ma douce, viens, dis, cest lheure

O les gens graves font des nez . . .
Nos pchs seront pardonns:
Nous rirons, puisque le ciel pleure.
Amour-Htel
Mon coeur est comme un Grand-Htel

O descendent les bien-aimes,
Et sur leurs valises fermes
Volent des Amours au pastel.
I receive them with all due respect,

Kindly carry their trunks, with no idle chatter,
Then they follow the alluring lure of my magnet,
My loving magnet: a knowing smile.
I whisper to them in a low voice: You will have

A very long stay, in this suitable room,
And one ne day, well walk in the Bois de la Cambre,
Some day, when we nd the time, but no time soon.
Your eyes will belong to me, your lip

Will belong to me, and your hands
Will wander every pathway
Of my body, inamed with fever.
We will exhaust all the treats

Of new kisses and sweet caresses,
And we will sip the guilty
Frenzy of those twin-sister lips.
We wont turn low the nightlight,

In order to shed light on our crime,
And the boudoir will turn golden,
With mysterious glimmers.
In the morning, very late, the waiter

Will appear with a tray of rose-colored
Liqueurs and preserves of roses
And pralines aoat in milk.
We wont be visiting museums

Or public galleries or
The churches, but we will see, at our leisure,
The innity of unappeased pleasure.
And when we have been all the rounds,

And tried out all the dishes at table,
If nothing unexpected arises,
Well pack up and say goodbye forever.
Max Waller 115
Je les recois sans leur rien dire,

Porte leurs malles doucement,
Puis elles suivent mon aimant,
Mon aimant aimant: le sourire!
Je leur murmure: Trs longtemps

Vous habiterez cette chambre,
Nous irons au bois de la Cambre
Le jour o nous aurons le temps.
Vos yeux seront miens, votre lvre

Sera mienne, et vos longues mains
Parcourront les moindres chemins
De mon corps perdu de vre.
Nous puiserons les douceurs

Des frais baisers et des caresses,
Et savourerons les ivresses
Coupables de deux lvres soeurs.
Nous nteindrons pas la veilleuse

Pour voir notre crime clair,
Et le boudoir sera dor
Dune lueur mystrieuse.
Le matin, trs tard, le valet

Nous servira des liqueurs roses,
De la conture de roses,
Et des pralines dans du lait.
Nous ne verrons pas les muses

Ni les monuments publics, ni
Les glisesmais linni
Des volupts inapaises:
Et quand nous aurons tout bien vu,

puis la table servie,
Sil narrive rien dimprvu,
Nous nous quitterons pour la vie!
Albert Giraud (18601929)

Albert Giraud is best known for his debut collection of poetry, the 1884
Pierrot lunaire (Paris: Lemerre), which in German translation, inspired
Schnbergs musical setting of 1912. The world of Girauds commedia
dellarte character, cruel and ironic, is closer in mood to Laforgue than to the suave
Bergamasque of Verlaines poetry. As an artist gure, Girauds Pierrot is an acrobat
who bounds from being into states of absence, mental alienation, and hallucina-
tion. Decapitations, suicidal hanging, and self-mutilation are recurrent themes in
Girauds Pierrot lunaire, a guignol in which a mocking and jaunty refrain accentu-
ates the bizarre subject matter.
In its brevity and in the tension between the jocose and shocking, the verse of
Pierrot lunaire is Girauds most successful. In the later collection, Hors du sicle
(1888), decadent themes are given a dense and traditional prosody. After the death
of Max Waller, Giraud assumed prominence at La Jeune Belgique and used his po-
sition to rail against the stylistic innovations of Verhaeren, whose work he mis-
understood and considered barbarous stammering. Girauds own verse in Hors du
sicle is Baudelairean, as are the themes. Initiation, with its emphasis on corrup-
tion and tormented self-awareness, echoes Baudelaires Femmes Damnes and
LHautontimoroumenos. Imagery of sacrilege, perversity, and damnation is
recurrent in the collection.
Red Mass
from Pierrot Lunaire
For the cruel Eucharist,

Midst a ash of blinding gold
And candles with troubling ame,
Pierrot steps forth from the sacristy.
His hand ordained with Grace

Rends his white adornments,
For the cruel Eucharist,
Midst a ash of blinding gold.
And with a sweeping gesture of pardon,

He shows the quirvering believers
His heart betwixt his bloody ngers,
Like a hideous, red host,
For the cruel Eucharist.
Waltz of Chopin
from Pierrot Lunaire
Like a bloodstained kiss

From tubercular lips,
This music lets sink
Its pained and morbid charm.
The white themes cruel lilt,

Suddenly crimsons the drapes,
Like a bloodstained kiss,
From tubercular lips.
The gentle and violent ux,

Of the melancholy waltz,
Leaves me with a real savor,
A stale, thick aftertaste
Like a bloodstained kiss.
Albert Giraud 119
Messe Rouge
from Pierrot Lunaire (1884)
Pour la cruelle Eucharistie,

Sous lclair des ors aveuglants
Et les cierges aux feux troublants,
Pierrot sort de la sacristie.
Sa main de la Grce investie,

Dchire ses ornements blancs,
Pour la cruelle Eucharistie,
Sous lclair des ors aveuglants.
Et dun grand geste damnistie

Il montre aux dles tremblants
Son coeur entre ses doigts sanglants,
Comme une horrible et rouge hostie
Pour la cruelle Eucharistie.
Valse de Chopin
from Pierrot Lunaire (1884)
Comme un baiser sanguinolent

De la bouche dune phtisique,
Il tombe de cette musique
Un charme morbide et dolent.
Un son cruel du thme blanc

Empourpre soudain la tunique
Comme un baiser sanguinolent
De la bouche dune phtisique.
Le rythme doux et violent

De la valse mlancolique
Me laisse une saveur physique,
Un fade arrire-got troublant,
Comme un baiser sanguinolent.
Initiation
from Hors du sicle
Come, my child: over there, guarded by an angel,

Treasurer of the secrets of forbidden Knowledge,
There bleeds, for corrupted hearts, a strange vine,
Twined with the hissing snake of Paradise Lost.
The angel sleeps when I wish. Come,

My beautiful child, eat with wanton teeth
The clusters where my mouth has bitten:
Tomorrow you will know the cost of the wine
And the power of the vintage your elder has sold you.
You will watch yourself act and think and live,

You will be at once the reader and the book,
The obscure writer of that hideous book.
And you will die very old, cultivating your pain,

For having abdicated the scepter of your ignorance,
Which raised you to the height of heroes and the gods.
The Missal
from Hors du sicle
You, my sister, are a profaned missal,

A Byzantine missal wreathed with obscene owers,
Illustrated long ago during midnight toil unclean,
In the depths of a Greek cloister by a condemned monk.
O suave missal of sin, dear to my heart!

Save for my desire alone, your feline caress,
Your feline caress, guileful and ne,
And the satin kiss of your parchment of esh.
Save for me the fervor of your pious text,

Where ery roses, bleeding and cruel,
Greedily mingle their sensual lips
And the breath of their most noiseless secrets;
Albert Giraud 121
Initiation
from Hors du Sicle (1888)
Viens, mon enfant: l-bas, sous la garde dun ange,

Trsorier des secrets du Savoir dfendu,
Pour les coeurs dvoys saigne une vigne trange
O sife le serpent du Paradis perdu.
Lange dort quand je veux. Va, mon bel enfant, mange

A folles dents la grappe o ma bouche a mordu:
Demain tu connatras le prix de la vendange
Et la vertu du vin que lan ta vendu.
Tu te regarderas agir, penser et vivre;

Tu seras la fois le lecteur et le livre
Et lobscur crivain de ce livre odieux;
Et tu mourras trs vieux, cultivant ta souffrance,

Pour avoir abdiqu le sceptre dignorance
Qui te sacrait lgal des hros et des dieux.
Le Missel
from Hors du Sicle (1888)
Vous tes, ma soeur, un missel profan,

Un missel byzantin euri de eurs obscnes,
Histori nagure en des veilles malsaines,
Au fond dun couvent grec, par un moine damn.
O missel du pch suave qui mest cher!

Garde mon seul dsir ta caresse fline,
Ta fline caresse, astucieuse et ne,
Et le soyeux baiser de ton vlin de chair.
Garde-moi la ferveur de ton texte pieux

O des roses de feu, saignantes et cruelles,
Mlent avidement leurs lvres sensuelles
Et lhaleine de leurs secrets silencieux;
And your henchmen wrapped in gold brocade

Intoxicated to watch beneath their arrows ight,
Martyred breasts ripening like peaches,
Under giant crucixes of ebony and sun.
Your angels with their ambiguous grace, kneeling

For erotic communion, so frail
That they let fall the veil of their wings
Over the shame of a spasm, invisible and most sweet.
And your virgins walking toward pale cradles,

Raising toward the naive sky their weak eyes,
Not knowing that they hold on a leash,
Instead of their lambs, equivocal swine.
Albert Giraud 123
Tes bourreaux lams dor de la nuque lorteil

Qui senivrent de voir, sous le vol de leurs ches,
Les seins martyriss mrir comme des pches
Sur de grands crucix dbne et de soleil;
Tes anges, et leur grce ambigu, genoux

Pour la communion rotique, si frles
Quils laissent retomber le luxe de leurs ailes
Sur la honte dun spasme invisible et trs doux;
Et tes vierges marchant vers de ples berceaux,

Levant au ciel naf les yeux de leur faiblesse,
Sans mme se douter quelles tiennent en laisse,
Au lieu de leurs brebis, dquivoques pourceaux!
Valre Gille (18671950)
Valre Gille assumed directorship of La Jeune Belgique between 1890

1891 and inaugurated the journals most receptive and cosmopolitan
phase, publishing Verlaine, Mallarm, Henri de Regnier, and Gustave
Kahn, whose vers librisme had been of great inuence in Belgium. The tenth anni-
versary of La Jeune Belgique marked a reconciliation with La Wallonie and a mood
of accomplishment and confraternity among Belgian writers. In 1891, a new sym-
bolist review, Le Reveil, was inaugurated and would continue publication until
1896.
As a poet, Valre Gille evoked states of Schopenhaurian inanition, the gentle ef-
uence from the shores of life of Golden Slumbers. His Legend is one of the
best examples of a recurrent Symbolist motif, the sleeping beauty, freed from the
taint of living, a denizen of a pure, Edenic, and interior world. Lost in a silver and
white landscape of artice and stillness, Gilles sleeping princesses are emblematic
of the poet as seer, absent from the quotidian realm of survival and struggle, lost
in communion with the inner life.
The Slumbers of Gold

from La Jeune Belgique 8 (1889)
I have forsaken my playthings, my mirrors, and my palms,

I have scented my golden hair with violets,
Bathed my body with essence of iris and violet
And have abandoned myself to the slow water.
Nothing to ponder, nothing to wish for, in this cradle

Of slumber and owers, which gently drifts away,
Love and hatred, wan madness, aimlessly drifting,
Listen to the music that sings down the stream.
White hands have closed the eyes of my childhood,

Red chalices surround my sleep with perfumes,
Golden leaves refresh my slumber,
As indolent lutes ravish the silence.
My sisters, with their bright smiles, look at their faces

Amid the childish luxuriance of roses,
Amid a soft indolence of roses,
Which crown their reections in the tranquil water.
Like an azure veil, the heavens tired of light,

Motionless, have fallen asleep in the moss,
All of my dreams have lain down to sleep,
Upon the golden sand at the bottom of the water.
Drifting away . . . see the frail columbine,

Let us forget days to come and die with grace,
Let us perfume our embraces and die with grace,
Because now the end has arrived with its pale, long ngers.
Legend
In the white forest of silver

where the mauve shadow of the glades
expands in clouds of light,
in a diamond mist,
Valre Gille 127
Les Sommeils dOr

Jai dlaiss mes jeux, mes miroirs et mes palmes,

Jai parfum mes blonds cheveux de violette,
Jai baign mon corps diris et de violette
Et je me suis abandonn sur les eaux calmes.
Rien penser, rien vouloir en ce berceau

De sommeil et de eur qui glisse la drive,
Ecoute la chanson qui chante au l de leau.
Des mains blanches ont clos les yeux de mon enfance,

Des calices vermeils parfument mon sommeil,
Des feuillages dor rafrachissent mon sommeil
Et des luths paresseux ravissent le silence.
Mes soeurs aux clairs sourires mirent leur visage

Parmi la oraison enfantine des roses,
Parmi les indolences suaves des roses
Qui couronnent dans leau tranquille leur mirage.
Comme un voile dazur les ciels las de lumire

Immobiles se sont endormis dans la mousse,
Tous mes rves se sont endormis dans la mousse
Et sur le sable dor au fond de la rivire.
A la drive . . . oh! vois ces frles ancolies!

Oublions lavenir et mourons avec grce
Parfumons nos baisers et mourons avec grce
Voici la n suprme et sa blanche agonie.
Lgende
Dans la blanche fort dargent

o lombre mauve des clairires
souvre en nuages de lumires

dans un brouillard de diamant,
Near the frozen fountains,

amid the ferns of frost,
where rose trees of snow surrender
chill owers to the icy mirrors,
Their lilac gowns spread

around their arms, linked in garlands,
the pallid queens of legends
are leaning upon urns.
But no one having sounded the awakening

in the frozen forest, whitened with ice,
the princesses could not live on
and sweetly died of endless sleep.
Valre Gille 129
Autour des fontaines geles,

parmi les fougres de givre
o le rosier de neige livre
aux vains miroirs ses eurs ourles,
Leurs robes lilas ployes

autour de leurs bras en guirlandes,
les ples reines des lgendes
sur des urnes sont appuyes.
Mais nul nayant sonn lveil

dans la blanche fort de givre,
les princesses nont pu survivre
et sont mortes de leur sommeil.
Iwan Gilkin (18581923)
In Iwan Gilkins Psychology, the poet-doctor probes the hidden ul-

cers of black passions and dissects souls. Such is the modality of
Gilkins poetry, intransigently classical in form, but steeped in a predilec-
tion for the decadent and unsavory. This is particularly evident in his Litany and
Prayer, in which Catholic form is used to unfurl a series of correspondences for
erotic experience with a femme fatale, worshipped, desired, and feared. The litany
progresses through twenty-three strophes, each dominated by an image or meta-
phor, beginning with the sublime, light, beacons, continuing with the sensual,
drugs, perfumes, music, and gardens, and ending in sordid and misogynous com-
parisons of the woman to a brothel and lepers asylum. Gilkin was haunted by a
peculiarly turn of the century phantasm, woman as a consuming vampire, a de-
stroyer of man. A sense of sin, guilt, and prurience suffuses Gilkins work.
Litanies and Prayer

Uncanny, calm, and almighty Beauty,

Fountain of Health, Mirror of Strangeness,
Listen to me!
Spiritual beacon, ignited upon the rocks,

Belfry of defunct days, where the bells sob,
Call to me!
Harbor, where the white sails and the smoking steamers,

Charged with valiant hearts, come from the ends of the seas,
Receive me!
Dizzying sun, you who cause visions

Of splendor and festivity to ower,
Dazzle me.
Gardener, who sows in the darkness of minds,

The unexpected dreams and unheard of words,
Render me fruitful.
Majestic river, where upon the slow water

Bursts the glory of scarlet and azure lotus,
Submerge me.
Ivory tower, castle which the temptations

Surround with their obsessions, but in vain,
Shelter me.
Twilit forest, where the nocturnal birds

Open their bright golden eyes and their silent ights,
Pacify me.
Gateway to paradise, inhabited by the absurd,

Hashish, the liberator from reality,
Deliver me.
Carpet of white velvet, where slowly tread

The solemn processions of arrogant thoughts,
Exalt me.
Iwan Gilkin 133
Litanies et Prire
Surnaturelle, calme et puissante Beaut,

Fontaine de sant, Miroir dtranget,
coutez-moi!
Phare spirituel allum sur les roches,

Beffroi des jours dfunts, o sanglotent les cloches,
Appelez-moi.
Hvre o les blancs voiliers et les fumeux steamers

Chargs de coeurs vaillants, viennent du bout des mers,
Accueillez-moi.
Soleil vertigineux, vous qui dans les yeux faites

Fleurir des visions de spendeurs et de ftes,
Aveuglez-moi!
Jardinier qui semez dans la nuit des cerveaux

Les songes imprvus et les verbes nouveaux,
Fcondez-moi.
Fleuve majestueux, o sur leau lente clate

La gloire des lotus dazur et dcarlate,
Submergez-moi.
Tour divoire, chteau que les tentations

Entourent vainement de leurs obsessions,
Abritez-moi.
Fort crpusculaire, o les oiseaux nocturnes

Ouvrent leurs clairs yeux dor et leurs vols taciturnes,
Apaisez-moi.
Porte du Paradis, par labsurde habit,

Hatschisch librateur de la ralit,
Dlivrez-moi.
Tapis de velours blanc, o marchent cadences

Damples processions dorgueilleuses penses,
Exaltez-moi.
Flagon, where whirls within a mind of crystal,

The madness of musk, amber, and sandalwood,
Perfume me.
Religious organ, whose swelling music

Constructs, within the heart, mystical cathedrals,
Raise me up.
House of gold and alabaster, where generous wines

Pour strong hope into the vagabonds,
Lodge me.
Silken liqueur, cream where fruits and balms

Blend their consolations and their subtle avors,
Intoxicate me.
Manna of love, paschal lamb, unleavened bread,

Miraculous feast, where the water changes to wine,
Provide for me.
Hammock, where an exotic, soft indolence

Sways in shadows of refreshing palm-groves,
Lull me to sleep.
Ofcinal gardens with gentle owering,

Where the herb of healing grows amid the lilies,
Cure me.
Balloon, conqueror of the sublime clouds,

Nostalgic carriage, rocker of long journeys,
Carry me away.
Secret book of the Sibyls, casket where sleeps

Far from the learned, many an austere secret,
Instruct me.
Heavy, opulent cape, where the tawny silks,

Star their golden elds with jeweled owers,
Clothe me.
Turquoise of sweetness, ruby of cruelty,

Topaz, where the light lulls the voluptuousness,
Adorn me.
Iwan Gilkin 135
Flacon, o tournent dans un cerveau de cristal

Les vertiges du musc, de lambre et du santal,
Parfumez-moi.
Orgue religieux dont les vastes musiques

Btissent dans les coeurs des glises mystiques,
levez-moi.
Maison dor et dalbtre, o les vins gnreux

Versent aux vagabonds les espoirs vigoureux,
Hbergez-moi.
Liqueur soyeuse, crme o les fruits et les baumes

Fondent leur bienfaisance et leurs subtils armes,
Enivrez-moi.
Manne damour, agneau pascal, pain sans levain,

Festin miraculeux o leau se change en vin,
Nourrissez-moi.
Hamac, quune exotique et moelleuse indolence

A lombre des palmiers rafrachissants balance,
Endormez-moi.
Jardin ofcinal aux douces oraisons,

O crot parmi les lys lherbe des gurisons,
Gurissez-moi.
Arostat vainqueur des sublimes nuages,

Nostalgique wagon, berceur des longs voyages,
Emportez-moi.
Livre mystrieux des Sibylles, coffret

O dort, loin des savants, maint austre secret,
Instruisez-moi.
Lourde mante opulente o les fauves soieries

toilent leurs prs dor de eurs de pierreries,
Revtez-moi.
Turquoise de douceur, Rubis de cruaut,

Topaze o la lumire endort la volupt
Adornez-moi.
Shameless brothel, full of lthy rapture,

Entangling all of the kisses and all of the dreariness,
Drain me!
Hypocritical sh-pond, where the slimy octopus

Drags his yielding tentacles over stinking gravel,
Destroy me!
Lazaret of the leprous, hospital of the poets,

Dark padded cell, rotting place of the prophets,
Suffocate me!
Neronian torch, o monstrous cross, where martyrs,

Anointed with grease and wax, blaze up,
Consume me!
Prayer
O You, most worshipped of all women,

Bride of dead hearts and sister to young souls,
Queen of ancient days, queen of days to come,
You, who bend a brow stained red with poppies,
Mistress of sleep, Sovereign of wakeful nights,
O you, who ruled over miracles in Sheba,
You, who in the age of Ahasuerus was Esther,
Bathing your childlike and precious esh,
Six months in myrrh and six months in aromatics,
You, who tamed the Nile on your fabled barge,
Devourer of heroes, drinker of jewels,
Cleopatra! the princess with strong auburn hair,
Who dragged your lovers, all bruised with lewdness,
From the crossroads of Rome to the gardens of Subur,
Untamed Messalinao vast and somber heart,
Who would have worn out the strength of Cretan bulls;
You, the eternal love, You, the eternal woman,
Absurd Devouring, ignoble and solemn,
Who sucks out life and empties our brains,
Rekindle, rekindle, beneath your long, devout lashes,
In their crystalline whites, like uid ivory,
Your ashen eyes, where broods a bitter, black ame;
And the better to entwine me with desire for your arms,
Iwan Gilkin 137
Lupanar hont, plein dimmondes ivresses,

Mlant tous les baisers et toutes les tristesses,
Epuisez-moi!
Hypocrite vivier, o des poulpes gluants

Tranent leurs suoirs mous sur les cailloux puants,
Dvorez-moi!
Lazaret des lpreux, hpital des potes,

Tnbreux cabanon, pourrissoir des prophtes,
Etouffez-moi!
Torche Nronienne, monstrueuse croix,

O ambent des martyrs oints de graisse et de poix,
Consumez-moi!
Prire
O Vous, femme adorable entre toutes les femmes,

pouse des coeurs morts et soeur des jeunes mes,
Reine des jours anciens, Reine des jours nouveaux,
Vous qui penchez un front empourpr de pavots,
Matresse du sommeil, Souveraine des veilles,
O Vous qui dans Saba rgniez sur les merveilles,
Vous qui ftes au temps dAssurus Esther,
Baignant votre enfantine et prcieuse chair
Six mois dhuile de myrrhe et six mois daromates;
Vous qui domptiez le Nil sous vos galres plates,
Mangeuse de hros, buveuse de bijoux,
Cloptre! princesse aux puissants cheveux roux,
Qui traniez vos amants tout meurtris de luxure
Des carrefours de Rome aux jardins de Suburre,
Farouche Messaline, large et sombre coeur,
Qui des taureaux crtois eut lass la vigueur;
Vous, lternel amour, Vous, la femme ternelle,
Dvoratrice absurde, ignoble et solennelle,
Qui sucez notre vie et videz nos cerveaux,
Rallumez, rallumez, sous vos longs cils dvots,
Dans leur cristallin blanc comme un uide ivoire,
Vos yeux de cendre o couve une pre amme noire;
Et, pour mieux menlacer du dsir de vos bras,
Braid, braid your ngers, perfumed with ananas,

Like the breathing wicker of an ardent basket,
Which my esh will bathe with its red liqueur,
And with your lily teeth, drunk with cruelty,
Where the aficted moon has congealed its brightness,
And with your insane nails, ushed red with roses,
Lacerate, knowingly, with exquisite pauses,
Full of sweet regrets, full of dear kisses,
My muscles and my bers, forever unsatised,
Until that day, Madonna, when your too smiling lips
Will press, in vain, the lips of my wounds.
Psychology
I am the doctor who dissects souls,

Bending my feverish brow over corruptions,
The vices, the sins, and the perversions,
Of primitive instinct and its infamous hunger.
On the marble, with stomachs open, men and women

Spread out, nastily, with their contortions,
The hidden ulcers of black passions.
I have ngered the sore secrets of tragedies.
Then, with both arms still tinged with scrofulous blood,

Poet, I have noted in my scrupulous verse,
All that my sharp eyes have seen in the shadows.
And if a subject is lacking for the dissecting knife,

I stretch out, in my turn, on the funereal slab,
Screaming, as I jab the scalpel into my heart.
Iwan Gilkin 139
Tressez, tressez vos doigts parfums dananas,

Comme losier vivant dune ardente corbeille,
Que ma chair baignera de sa liqueur vermeille;
Et de vos dents de lys, ivres de cruaut,
O la lune afige a g sa clart,
Et de vos ongles fous, euris de jeunes roses,
Dchirez savamment, avec dexquises pauses
Pleines de doux regrets, pleines de chers baisers,
Mes muscles et mes nerfs toujours inapaiss
Jusquau jour, Madone, o vos lvres trop gaies
Presseront vainement les lvres de mes plaies.
Psychologie
Je suis un mdecin qui dissque les mes,

Penchant mon front vreux sur les corruptions,
Les vices, les pchs et les perversions
De linstinct primitif en apptits infmes.
Sur le marbre, le ventre ouvert, hommes et femmes

Etalent salement dans leurs contorsions
Les ulcres cachs des noires passions.
Jai palp les secrets douloureux des grands drames.
Puis, les deux bras encor teints dun sang scrofuleux,

Pote, jai not dans mes vers scrupuleux
Ce que mes yeux aigus ont vu dans ces tnbres.
Et sil manque un sujet au couteau dissqueur,

Je mtends mon tour sur les dalles funbres
Et jenfonce en criant le scapel dans mon coeur.
Georges Khnopff (18801927)
The uncollected verse of Georges Khnopff has been overshadowed by

the genius and lasting renown of his brother, the artist, Fernand
Khnopff, whose works were largely inspired by the motifs and enig-
matic style of Symbolist writing. It was Georges Khnopff who introduced his
brother to Verhaeren and Rodenbach and to the writing of Mallarm, for which
Khnopff provided the frontispiece in a Deman edition. Georges Khnopff was
among the rst and most active participants in the resurgence of Belgian litera-
ture, his poetry appearing prominently in La Jeune Belgique between 1883 and
1885. Khnopff then broke with the increasingly parnassian journal and, in a Sep-
tember, 1885 letter in LArt Moderne, a review largely devoted to the visual arts,
emphasized the importance of the stylistic renewals of symbolist poetry. In 1887,
Georges Khnopff joined Verhaeren at La Wallonie.
Georges Khnopff s An Evening, is dedicated to Georges Rodenbach. The
poem conveys a mood of serenity tinged with melancholy solitude, evoked
through concrete, visual impressions of a seashore, gilded and weighted with an
opulent sunset. Overtones of German Romanticism may be discerned in this
northern seascape which becomes the site of spiritual experience, a presentiment
of universal tranquility and devout silence.
EveningLife: Serenity
A stroke of gold at the edge of the white skies,

Shudders:the sonorous sea has soothed its rage;
Lonely, streaking the brightness with its circular ight,
A plaintive crying of seagulls passes.
The surge remains deaf to the sobs of the sun,

As the golden orb dims in the bloodstained foam,
The exhausted surge murmurs in the mist
To the snowy birds with reddened plumage.
The distances, lightly stroked by white visions,

Share the sweetness of infants drowsing in swaddling;
Serenity shines in the rmament.
And while the song of the stars is scattered,

I hear God, as he mysteriously whispers
A sweet confession of love to the heart of the silence.
Georges Khnopff 143
SoirLa Vie: Srnit

Une barre de feu tout au bord des cieux blancs

Frmit:la mer sonore a calm sa colre;
Seul, rayant la clart de son vol circulaire,
Passe un roucoulement plaintif de golands;
Les ots demeurent sourds aux sanglots du soleil

Dont lorbe dor steint dans la sanglante cume,
Les ots extnus murmurent dans la brume
Vers les oiseaux de neige au plumage vermeil;
Les lointains efeurs par des visions blanches

Ont la douceur denfants assoupis dans leurs langes;
Et la srnit luit dans le rmament.
Et, tandis que le chant des toiles slance,

Jentends Dieu chuchoter mystrieusement
Un doux aveu damour lme du silence.
Jean Delville (18671953)
Both a painter and poet, Jean Delville was an animator of the cultural life
of Brussels at the turn of the century. During stays in Paris, Delville was
inuenced by the occultism of Villiers de lIsleAdam and especially
Josephin Pladan, founder of the Salon Rose-Croix for the exhibition of Idealist
art. Delville was also opposed to naturalist and realist painting, seeking instead to
present images culled from exterior reality but which refer to an ineffable experi-
ence of the mind. In 1892, Delville founded in Brussels the Salon Pour lArt, which
became an important exhibition space for artists creating under the aura of sym-
bolism. Among others, it welcomed Rodin, Gall, and Puvis de Chauvannes. In
1896, Delville opened the Salon de lArt Idaliste, which continued exhibitions of
art with evocative imagery. Jean Delville was a director of the Glasgow Academy
of Fine Arts and professor at the Brussels Academy until 1930.
Unlike the intimist, secretive work of Fernand Khnopff, Jean Delvilles paint-
ings have an imposing Wagnerian scope and grandeur, peopled by the persona of
myth and legend. Androgynous angels, freed from contingency, and clairvoyants,
surrounded by astral light, are also denizens of Delvilles painted universe.
Delvilles interest in the occult is revealed in the poems, The Sacred Book, and
Magica, a portrait of a clairvoyant, who transcends time and space and whose
word is allied to angels. Lunar Park suggests a Mallarmean landscape of evanes-
cence, where a dream of incense symphonies the lustral lake. The Horror of the
Rain, an evocation of a locus of dejection, a dismal city, long bereaved of sun,
reveals the stylistic and thematic inuence of Emile Verhaeren.
Magica
Behold the hour for your clairvoyant eyes to shine,

Intent Pythoness, inert in the silent heart of evening!
Your spirit has departed, lost amid the soul of the world,
Seeking the treasure, as your desire weaves its magic.
The sacred ame, which reabsorbs your eshly being,

Will soon transform the chasms of life into blazing pyres,
As the powers summon you to most secret sabbaths,
Reality of the rmament or infernal nightmare!
The holy aromatic burns in bright vessels;

For you, the world is a pure enchantment,
Where you hover, dazzled, above the element,
And the angel, whom your word calls in the twilight,

Will come to reect in the depths of a black temple,
The brilliance of his golden brow, in a magic mirror.
Jean Delville 147
Magica
Voici lheure o luiront tes beaux yeux de voyante,

pythonisse au coeur mr prosterne en la nuit!
Parmi lme du monde est all ton esprit
pour chercher les trsors que ton dsir incante.
Le feu spirituel qui rsorbe ta chair

embrasera soudain les gouffres de la vie;
aux sabbats enchants le pouvoir te convie,
ralit du ciel ou rve de lenfer!
Laromate sacr dans les clairs rchauds brle.

Lunivers est pour toi le pur enchantement
o ton tre bloui plane sur llment.
Et lAnge que ton verbe voque au crpuscule

viendra rverbrer du fond du temple noir
lclat de son front dor au magique miroir!
Jean Delville. Expectation, 1903.
The Holy Book

from La Jeune Belgique 14, 1895
Turning the golden pages with my fervent hands,

As if my pure ngers were handling light,
O immense and luminous book, your powerful prayer
Unfolds, in my night, the mystical treasure!
My spirit, in the night, opens its angels glances,

To plunge their luster into the recesses of your wisdom;
For those who read you, the secret will be known,
Of how divine love changes even degradation into radiance.
Eternal and veiling the horror of the world,

An ineffable mystery has joined mankind and verse,
The human ideal to the most divine ames,
And from the depth of the esh to the reaches of the azure,
You lift the veil, the enshrouder of souls,
To the sybilline breath of your enchanted word.
Lunar Park
from La Wallonie III (188990)
Becalmed the profane noise of the crowd.

Toward the risen Moon, the symbolic Bronzes
Curve, in the blue night, their antique nudity,
In the sphinx-like majesty of attitudes.
A dream of incense symphonies the lustral Lake,

Enchanted by the sidereal presence of Swans,
Elegiacally swooning their silver-pale lines,
Beneath the sacred music of astral innitude.
Drunken with silence, the aching lawns

Grow languid in the brightness of calm reveries;
Amid the somnolent shadows of the bowers
Hovers the conjugal slumber of weary birds;

And the mute asphalt of the abandoned pathways
No longer shudders beneath the lascivious step of idylls.
Jean Delville 151
Le Livre Sacr
De mes ferventes mains tournant tes pages dor,

comme si mes doigts purs palpaient de la lumire,
Livre immense et clair, ta puissante prire
rvle dans ma nuit le mystique trsor!
Mon esprit, dans le soir, ouvre ses regards dange

pour plonger leur clat au fond de ton savoir;
ceux qui te liront le Secret fera voir
comment lamour divin fait rayonner la fange.
ternel, et voilant leffroi de lunivers,

un mystre ineffable a ml lhomme aux vers
et lidal humain aux plus divines ammes.
Et, du fond de la chair lazur consult,

tu soulves le voile enveloppeur des mes
au soufe sibyllin de ton verbe enchant.
Parc Lunaire
from La Wallonie 3 (188990)
Saccalme la rumeur profane des multitudes.

Vers la Lune ascendue les Bronzes symboliques
Galbent dans la nuit bleue leurs nudits antiques
En la sphingesque majest des attitudes.
Un rve dencens symphonise le LAC lustral

Quincante la prsence sidrale des Cygnes,
Elgiaquement pmant leurs albes lignes
Sous les musiques sacres de linni astral.
Senivrant de silence les pelouses endolories

Salanguissent en la clart de calmes rveries;
Parmi lombrage somnolent des charmilles
Plane le conjugal sommeil des oiseaux lasss;

Et lasphalte muette des sentiers dlaisss
Ne frmit plus sous le pas lascif des idylles.
The Horror of the Rain

from La Wallonie IV (189192)
Implacably, dismally, prophetically,

It is raining interminable tears of rain, it rains
death upon the dismal city, long bereaved of sun.
It rains annihilation, immensely, upon my sleep
and my tormented dreams and, in the night, it rains
implacably, dismally, prophetically . . .
Oh! the secret sorrow of the Night weeps

Upon the pale wakefulness of my pensive mind.
Upon the slab of my brow, with funereal sobs,
it is raining lividness and obscurity,
upon the pale wakefulness of my pensive mind,
oh! the secret sorrow of the Night weeps . . .
It is raining, it is raining lethargy upon my esh,

rigidly, like chimerical haircloths,
which come to mortify the lecherous obsessions,
it is raining upon my feverish body, scorched with gasps,
Rigidly, like chimerical haircloths,
it is raining lethargy, it is raining upon my esh . . .
The Marmorean Slumbers

from La Wallonie IV (189192)
Thus, the souls of dismal feudal lineage,

Perpetuating their pride in illustrious sepulchers,
Stretch out their long, marble sleep upon the agstones,
Weighted with dead centuries and funereal pasts,
The heraldic and grandiose white cadavers,

With righteous hands joined in ardent rigidity,
Pallid with faith, that rise from their bosoms,
With sacerdotal gestures of prayer in eternity.
Jean Delville 153
LHorreur de la Pluie
Implacablement, mornement, fatidiquement

il pleut dinterminables pleurs de pluie, il pleut
de la mort sur la ville morne et morte de soleil.
Il pleut du nant, immensment, sur mon sommeil
et mes songes de spleen et dans la Nuit, il pleut
implacablement, mornement, fatidiquement . . .
Oh! la tnbreuse douleur de la Nuit pleure

Sur la veille ple de mon cerveau pensif.
Sur la dalle de mon front en sanglots funbres
il pleut des lividits et des tnbres,
sur la veille ple de mon cerveau pensif
oh! la tnbreuse douleur de la Nuit pleure . . .
Il pleut, il pleut de la lthargie sur ma chair,

rigidement comme des cilices fantastiques
qui veulent macrer les hantises stuprales,
il pleut sur mon corps ardent brl de rles.
Rigidement comme des cilices fantastiques
il pleut de la lthargie, il pleut sur ma chair . . .
Les Sommeils de Marbre

Ainsi les Ames des mornes races fodales

perptuant lorgueil en spulcres clbres,
gisent leur long sommeil de marbre sur les dalles
lourdes de sicles morts et de passs funbres,
les hraldiques et grands cadavres blancs

aux droites mains jointes dardente rigidit
et qui, blmes de foi, srigent hors les ancs
hiratiquement pour des prires dternit.
Beneath a heavy mourning of shadows in the tumulus crypts,

Within the illustrious vision of their solemn brows slumbers,
The barbarous splendor of age-old reigns.
And their bodies, where the original blood has congealed,

Sealed within the marbles, austerely patrician,
Are the petried Phantoms of ancient times.
Jean Delville 155
Sous le lourd deuil dombres des cryptes tumulaires

dort en le songe illustre de leur front solennel,
la barbare splendeur des rgnes sculaires.
Et leurs corps o sest glac le sang originel,

sont dans les marbresrigidement patriciens
les Fantmes ptris des temps anciens.
Georges Marlow (18721947)
Of British and Ligois descent, Georges Marlow was born and raised in
the Flemish city of Malines. He was a physician and a writer, elected to
both the directing committee of the College of Medicine and to the
Royal Academy of Letters. His principal literary activity was as a critic and cultural
ambassador, contributing a monthly Chroniques de la Belgique to the Mercure
de France between 191932 and 193640. He founded and edited Le Masque, one
of the last symbolist reviews, published 191114. He contributed poems in his own
name and as Paul Alriel, often in the same issue, to Le Reveil, the journal which
was the successor of La Wallonie.
In his 1895 collection, LAme en exil, Georges Marlow evokes Malines as a dead
city, an interiorized space of remembrance, using a gently musical, Verlainian style
to express the theme inaugurated by Rodenbach. As a city encompassed by the
soul, Marlows Malines is evoked in a series of diminutives. In At Evening I, it is
the little, desolate city, the slender city, where the bells are a bit melancholy
and all is dimmed. Marlows city seems remote and suggestive to the extent that it
is etherialized to the dimension of a delicate book illumination from the vanished
Flemish past.
At Evening I
from Le Reveil 3 (1893)
Little city, and you the Bells,

My sisters, whose vague music,
A bit melancholy,
Snows its reproaches within my soul.
Little desolate city,

Who remembers all the dead voices,
All the withered voices,
That the autumn sweeps away with the owers,
Say, are you crying over my childhood,

Where all the gleams have dimmed,
Under the frail wing of silence,
Little city of dear plaints? . . .
The sweet Child never came at all

And will surely never come . . .
Gone, the lilies in the avenues
And no more roses along the roads!
All the owers have faded away,

With the sad melodies of the years,
And in this waiting, but so in vain,
My soul hovers, faintly,
Amid your sonorous turrets,

Slender city of a thousand bells,
Amid the parcels of dawn
That the sky hangs on your towers.
Georges Marlow 159
Du Soir
Petite ville et vous les Cloches

Mes Soeurs, dont la vague musique
Un tantinet mlancolique
Neige en mon me ses reproches,
Petite ville dsole

Qui vous souvenez des voix mortes,
De toutes les voix en alles
Quavec les eurs lautomne emporte,
Dites, pleurez-vous mon enfance

O les lueurs se sont teintes
Sous laile frle du silence
Petite ville aux chres plaintes? . . .
La douce Enfant nest point venue

Et ne viendra jamais sans doute . . .
O plus de lys dans lavenue
Et plus de roses sur la route!
Toutes les eurs se sont fanes

En cette attente combien vaine
Aux chansons tristes des annes,
Et mon me plane incertaine,
Parmi vos tourelles sonores

Fluette ville aux mille cloches,
Parmi les parcelles daurore
Qu vos donjons le ciel accroche! . . .
Fernand Severin (18671931)
Fernand Severin has tenuous ties with the literary revival in Belgium at
the turn of the century. During his student days in Brussels, Severin con-
tributed poems to La Jeune Belgique, published in 1888 as Le Lys, a series
having to do with unfullled waiting for an imagined beloved. Severin later repu-
diated the volume as juvenilia. During the twelve years he spent as a teacher at Vir-
ton in the Ardennes, Severin cultivated a classical style and direct discourse to ex-
press a romantic love of nature. The poetry published in the 1895 Un Chant dans
lombre, although dedicated to his friend, Charles Van Lerberghe, is distanced from
the symbolist creation of the author of La Chanson dEve.
Severins early poetry remains interesting, a juncture of Racine and Verlaine, as
his contemporary, Albert Arnay, commented in La Wallonie IV. In Severins 1886
She, Who Will Come, the poets desire for a private space of love leads to an im-
agined Liebestod in a shrine where the lovers sleep enlaced upon faded roses.
She, Who Will Come

You, who will come from the distances of hope

In the gardens of lilies, where my lips await,
Say to me only words full of dream and evening,
To calm, within me, the re of ancient fevers.
May your love be for me the intended tomb,

Where we will sleep, enlaced, upon faded roses,
The lips of the beloved pressed to the brow of the chosen,
And may thus the ower of our years disappear.
Nothing will really live, but that which we conceal,

And to perpetuate this moment that we are,
May our precious bouquets die away while in bud
And hide their fragrance from the vain kisses of men.
The sorrow of lovers and the tedium of the married,

Those pitiful satiated, whose soul is in exile,
Will arrive at our threshold and will go away from us,
Without ever suspecting the peace they approached.
And we will watch them, bearing away their cross,

With eyes in tears, with our boundless pity,
And these, our amorous eyes, will sometimes understand
How to bring a smile to blighted, mournful gazes.
And none among these men of latter days

Will know that love offered this precious gift to them;
As soon as they return to their thirst, their hunger,
They will curse the day, fallen into death.
Fernand Severin 163
A Celle qui Viendra

O toi qui me viendras des lointains de lespoir

Dans les jardins de lys o tattendent mes lvres,
Ne me dis que des mots pleins de rve et de soir
Et qui calment en moi le feu des vieilles vres.
Que ton amour me soit un spulcre voulu

O lon dorme enlacs dans des roses fanes,
Les lvres de laime au front las de llu,
Et que scroule ainsi la eur de nos annes.
Rien ne vivra vraiment que ce que nous tairons,

Et pour terniser cet instant que nous sommes
Puissent nos chers bouquets se mourir en boutons
Et cler leur parfum au vain baiser des hommes.
La douleur des amants et lennui des poux,

Ces pauvres assouvis dont lme est exile,
Viendront notre seuil et sen iront de nous
Sans soupconner jamais la paix quils ont frle.
Aussi les verrons-nous sen aller sous leurs croix

Avec les yeux en pleurs, dune piti sans bornes,
Et ces yeux amoureux sentendront quelquefois
Pour donner un sourire aux yeux tris et mornes.
Et nul jamais parmi ces hommes de la n

Ne saura que lamour leur t ce don sublime,
Et sitt de retour, dans leur soif et leur faim,
Ils maudiront le jour tomb dans leur abme.
Gregoire Le Roy (18621941)
Along with Maurice Maeterlinck and Charles Van Lerberghe, Gregoire

Le Roy was the third member of the Ghent triumvirate that made its lit-
erary debut together in the 1887 Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique. Le Roys
most important symbolist collection is Mon Coeur Pleure dAutrefois (Paris:Van-
nier, 1889), characterized by repetitive rhymes, series of hypnotic spinning songs,
conducive to the suppression of the vigilance of the conscious mind. The folkloric
style is used to evoke spatializations of the ineffable, effected through junctures of
the concrete and abstract similar to those found in Maeterlincks Serres chaudes. In
Wretchedness, Le Roys mendicant begs on the shores of deceased time. His
palace of dreams has been ransacked by the envious masses of falsehoods. The
indeterminate takes both a spatial and auditory form in Dimmed Christmases,
Do you hear over there, over there, in my thoughts, / The grandmothers as they
recount fabulous tales? Nostalgia is the constant theme of Mon Coeur Pleure
dAutrefois, not for any specic, lost past, but for the veiled life of the unconscious,
The remembrance of things / That never were for us, but a memory! Le Roys is
a collection of dream formations coaxed to the borderline of consciousness, reliant
upon a lulling expression which in turn provokes reverie on the part of the reader.
In Fernand Khnopff s 1889 frontispiece for the collection, a narcissistic kiss in an
aqueous mirror and the bridge and gateway of the Beguinage at Bruges serve as
emblems of entrance into the inner world.
In 1907, Le Roy published La Chanson du Pauvre, eighteen years after Mon
Coeur Pleure dAutrefois, using a Verlainean style to express themes of Flemish
country life found in Verhaerens Villages Illusoires and Les Campagnes Hallucines.
Le Roy turned to the study of the visual arts, became a painter and curator of the
Muse Wiertz in Brussels.
Wretchedness
from My Heart Weeps for Days Long Past (1889)
Since the palace of my dreams

And of my loves was laid waste
By the envious masses of falsehoods,
I trail my pale royalty.
Now I am the strange pauper of dreams,

The mendicant of ancient perfumes,
The exiled from starving shores,
Who begs on the roads of deceased time.
And you, the women who pass through my pain,

If my love implores you, know that it is lying,
Because my impoverished hands are held in prayer
Only for a little memory.
....
The Fiance of Shadows

from My Heart Weeps for Days Long Past (1889?)
Who is she, in this manor of dreams,

With windows barely opened,
Who is she, at the edge of the green plains,
At the horizons of illusion,
Who is she, in this manor, that Lady
Who reigns upon the throne of darkness?
What are these grey, funereal walls,

Searching themselves in the pond
Like a criminal before his heart?
Who is the frail-looking child?
Who is the queen, spinning out her days,
And who waits these many years?
What are these mystic souls

Hidden within monastic halls,
And who, beneath oriental lamps,
With an indolent, languid mien,
Weave pale, very pale linen,
And for whom? For whom!
Gregoire Le Roy 167
Misre
from Mon Coeur Pleure dAutrefois
Depuis que le palais de mes songes

Et de mes amours fut dvast
Par le peuple jaloux des mensonges,
Je trane ma ple royaut.
Je suis ltrange indigent de rves,

Ce mendiant danciens parfums,
Lexil des famliques grves,
Qui prie aux routes des temps dfunts.
Et vous, passantes en ma misre,

Si mon amour vous implore, il ment
Car mes mains pauvres sont en prire
Dun peu de souvenir seulement.
......
La Fiance de lOmbre
Quelle est, en ce manoir des songes,

Aux fentres peine ouvertes,
Quelle est, au loin des plaines vertes
Et de lhorizon des mensonges,
Quelle est, en ce manoir, la Dame
Qui rgne au trne des tnbres!
Quels sont ces murs gris et funbres

Qui se regardent dans ltang,
Comme un coupable dans son me?
Quelle est la maladive enfant,
Quelle est la reine qui sy trane
Et qui, depuis des ans, attend?
Quelles sont ces mes mystiques

Qui, dans des salles monastiques,
Sous des lampes orientales,
Dun air indolent, alangui,
Tissent des toiles ples, ples?
Et pour qui?
Dimmed Christmases
from My Heart Weeps for Days Long Past (1889)
It is the hour of my heart and evening, over the world,

Has joined its hands of sleep, its shadowy hands;
It is the hour when sweetly dreams the roundelay
Of old women of legend and of mystic dwarfs.
Do you hear, over there, over there, in my thoughts,

The grandmothers, as they recount fabulous tales?
Like the mute passage of the spirits through the shadows
Or the silence of a wing as it brushes a branch?
I see, within the ancient houses of my soul,

The little ones, late at night, before a roaring re,
As they listen, as if in dream, to a very old woman,
And the wind that wanders the shadows, rhythmically and slow.
Those are the very old evenings in old thatched cottages,

Those are old winters, which snow outside . . .
And then, in the trembling gentleness of the lights,
Gently, gently, o my heart, you fall asleep . . .
The old woman speaks far away and the story comes to an end,
Far away, in a manor, like an end of day,
While in a very vague corner, a spinning wheel dreams,
Like the heart of a princess exiled from love,
O gentleness, o languor! This remembrance of things

That never were for us, but a memory!
O days, barely lived, so plaintive and rose,
And dead! so gentle in death that we wish to die!
Long ago, in our childhood, there was a prince or a princess,

For whom we wept, sometimes, now and again, and how often remembered
With love and regret! someone given over to sadness,
Someone dearly loved, someone who has gone away!
Gregoire Le Roy 169
Les Nols teints

Cest lheure de mon coeur et le soir, sur le monde,

Joint ses mains de sommeil, ses tnbreuses mains;
Cest lheure, doucement, o se rve la ronde
Des vieilles de lgende et des mystiques nains,
Entendez-vous l-bas, l-bas dans ma pense,

Les aeules conter de fabuleux rcits?
Comme un silence daile et de branche froisse,
Le passage muet, sur lombre, des esprits?
Je vois, dans les maisons anciennes de mon me,

La veille des petits devant le feu ronant:
Ils entendent, de rve, une trs vieille femme
Et le vent qui dans lombre erre rythmique et lent.
Ce sont de trs vieux soirs dans de vieilles chaumires:

Ce sont de vieux hivers qui neigent au dehors . . .
Alors dans la douceur tremblante des lumires,
Doucement, doucement, mon coeur, tu tendors . . .
La vieille parle au loin et lhistoire sachve

Au loin, dans un manoir, comme une n de jour,
Tandis que dans un coin trs vague un rouet rve,
Comme un coeur de princesse exil de lamour,
O douceur, langueur! Ce souvenir de choses

Qui ne furent jamais, pour nous, quun souvenir!
O jours si peu vcus, si plaintifs et si roses!
Et morts! si douces morts quon en voudrait mourir!
Jadis, dans notre enfance, un prince, une princesse

Que nous pleurons parfois, et, combien rappel
Damour et de regret! quelquun de la tristesse,
Quelquun de bien aim, quelquun sen est all!
Albert Mockel (18661945)
Albert Mockel was a poet, musician, and literary critic. In 1886, he

founded La Wallonie, the Lige-based journal, which would make Bel-
gium a center of European literary life. All of the great symbolist writers
contributed to La Wallonie during its seven years of publication, the time limit
which Mockel had set at its inception. From the outset, La Wallonie was a nexus of
Franco-Belgian literary alliance, co-edited by the Belgians, Mockel and Pierre
Olin, and the French poet, Henri de Regnier. Mockel, himself, divided his time
between Belgium and Paris, where he was an intimate of Mallarm and his circle.
In his theoretical writings, Mockel synthesized the thought of Mallarm. As a lit-
erary critic, Mockel devoted book-length studies to Mallarm (1899), Van Lerber-
ghe (1904), and Verhaeren (1917).
Mockels true prominence stems from his position as a nurturer and mid-wife
to the new literature in Belgium. His own early poetry, Chantefable, un peu nave
(published privately in Lige, 1891) and Clarts (Paris: Mercure de France, 1901),
seems slight in comparison to the innovative works of his friends, Lerberghe and
Elskamp. As he emphasized in his theoretical writings, music was, for Mockel, the
most signicant of all the arts. The interludes and songs which he composed to ac-
company the poetry are an interesting aspect of the early volumes, an attempt at a
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a meshing of the arts as a totality. Mockels late
volume, La Flamme Immortelle (Bruxelles: La Renaissance de Livre, 1924) is an im-
portant prolongation of the symbolist aesthetic during the 1920s. In this collec-
tion, an unnamed he and she engage in an inner dialogue, an exploration of the
psyche and the esh, the secret rhythms of attraction, from alternating male and
female perspectives. The poem is a sustained hymn to the inexhaustable fountain
of desire, the wellsprings of creation.
Carmen
from La Wallonie I (188687)
Do you recall? the ocean swelled its glistening

Waves, where emerald glimmers were gliding.
Uncertain furrows phosphoresced in the darkness,
Voice of the endless Dream, lightning of the giant Voices.
Child, your pallor grazed my savage love,

Lilies exhaling the perfume of promises to the skies
And with an iris reection, with limpid caresses,
Your gaze embraced my triumphant gaze.
...
And we wept, Carmen, we wept tears of re,

In the whisperer Night, with its vague shimmering;
Impassable and sinister in the shifting heart of the waves,
A shade arose, as slow as a farewell.
Then the prophetic shade, with mysterious voices,

And the innite, dreamy plaint of the waves
Spoke of the despair of Man and the sobbing
Of a dead Illusion and its dazzling tears . . .
And in the whiteness snowing in the tide of phosphorus,

We listened to the mysterious Voices.
To the Destroyer
La Wallonie I (188687)
Sphinx, fascinating specter of the deceptive vows,

Broken skeleton with creaking vertebrae,
Your merciless claw has gleamed in my darkness,
Like a lightning of horror, writhing over the living.
I fear you, I despise you: my weakness begs you,

Gaze of the Nights, phantom with phosphorescent eyes,
Your hand, morbid hope of adolescents in tears,
Pours a chill of silence upon the plangent pains.
Albert Mockel 173
Carmen
Ten souviens-tu? La mer enait ses chatoyantes

Vagues o des lueurs smaragdines glissaient.
Dans le noir, des sillons douteux phosphorescaient:
Voix du Rve ternel, clair des Voix gantes.
Ta pleur efeura mon fauve amour enfant,

Lys exhalant aux cieux le parfum des promesses
Et dun reet diris aux limpides caresses,
Ton regard enlacait mon regard triomphant.
....
Et nous avons pleur, Carmen, des pleurs de feu.

En la Nuit chuchotteuse aux luisarnements vagues,
Impassible et sinistre au sein mouvant des vagues
Une ombre se dressa, lente comme un adieu.
Or lombre fatidique aux voix mystrieuses

Et la plainte innie et rveuse des ots
Disaient le dsespoir de lHomme et les sanglots
Dune Illusion morte aux larmes radieuses. . . .
Et des blancheurs neigeant au phosphore des ots

Nous avons cout les Voix mystrieuses.
A La Faucheuse
Spectre fascinant, Sphinx,oh les voeux dcevants!

Squelette disloqu dont craquent les vertbres
Comme un clair dhorreur tordu sur les vivants.
Je te crains. Je te hais: mes faiblesses timplorent.

Regard des Nuits, fantme aux yeux phosphorescents,
Ta main, morbide espoir des pleurs adolescents,
Verse un froid de silence aux douleurs qui plangorent.
My cowardly dread loathes you, Death, priestess of time.

Your frenzy is a torrent, rolling in deep waves,
To snatch Love from the entrails of all the worlds:
And Death, you laugh out, in mourning, your piercing screams.
I beseech you, o Queen with the vampires kiss,

Close your arms and your void to one of my verses,
So that hope, with her wings toward the gigantic Future,
May throb in the eternal suffering of the work.
Intoxication
from The Immortal Flame (1924)
He:
Immobile evening, where a murmur of aspens dies;

Evening, heavy with all the stormy weight of a long day.
The air sties a beating of wings; the sky trembles,
And the ground, strengthless, has fainted with love.
In this hour which languishes, thirsting, I lean

Over your grace, mirrored in the light of memory,
Where you glide, shiver of shoulder, lightning of hip,
Nude, in the inexhaustible fountain of desire.
But now awakens, troubling, intoxicating me,

Your perfume, where survives the suave secret of a kiss.
And, barely wandering in the sleep of a breeze, it is
A breath that succumbs but does not wish to be exhausted,
A soul that is stirred, a esh that breaks to pieces . . .
Albert Mockel 175
Mon lche effroi te hait, Mort, prtresse du Temps.

Ta fureur est un ux roulant vagues profondes
Pour arracher lAmour aux entrailles des mondes:
Et tu ris dans le deuil, Mort, tes cris clatants. . . .
Je te supplie, Toi. Reine au baiser de pieuvre,

Ferme lun de mes vers tes bras et ton nant,
Pour quun espoir ail vers lAvenir gant
Palpite en la souffrance ternelle de loeuvre.
Enivrement
from La Flamme Immortelle (1924)
Lui.
Soir immobile o meurt un murmure de trembles;

soir lourd de tout le poids orageux dun long jour.
Lair touffe un battement dailes; le ciel tremble,
et la terre sans force a dfailli damour.
Dans lheure qui languit, altr je me penche

sur ta grce mire au clair du souvenir
o tu glisses, frisson dpaule, clair de hanche,
nue en linexhaustible source du dsir.
Mais voici que sveille, et me trouble, et me grise

ton parfum o survit le secret du baiser.
Et cest, peine errant au sommeil de la brise,
un soufe qui succombe et ne veut spuiser,
une me qui smeut, une chair qui se brise . . .

The Prey
from The Immortal Flame (1924)
She:
Cruel one! when you came to me,

I was nothing but a sole cry of suffering and dread.
My heart rebelled, but I hardly wept,

already submissive, a slave to bear all of the pains,
when you came, unknotting my woolen tunics,
to oppose your harshness to my vain starts.
I screamed! and my esh was nothing but a shrill laughter,
and Hope was sobbing over the lost dream.
What am I in your hands? the shuddering prey

whose cry of fear is the same as a cry of joy.
When your force bends and subdues me, vanquished,
I am the child who doubts, turns back, and will not;
I push away and I press, with my knees and with my arms,
desperately, with all of my convulsive fear,
the approach of the burning mystery that kills me . . .
And the current of re carries me away from shore,
As exiled Hope sings on the other bank.
...
Friend, when I come to you

I admit, in a cry, my delirious emotion.
What matters your stern brow and your foreign soul?
I have shattered the altar of the god whom I awaited.
As your mouth, my thirst, which nothing can quench,
has drunk the voluptuousness of a deadly delight;
and I surrender to your re, renounced in vain,
a love, wherein my ecstatic shame survives.
Albert Mockel 177
La Proie
from La Flamme Immortelle (1924)
Elle:
Cruel! lorsque tu vins moi,

je ne fus quun seul cri de souffrance et deffroi.
Mon coeur se rvoltait; mais je pleurais peine,

dj soumise, esclave subir tous les maux,
quand tu vins, dnouant mes tuniques de laine,
opposer ta rigueur mes vains soubresauts.
Je criais! et ma chair ntait quun rire aigu,
et lEspoir sanglotait vers le songe perdu.
Que suis-je dans tes mains? la palpitante proie

dont le cri dpouvante gale un cri de joie.
Quand ta force me courbe et me dompte, vaincue,
je suis lenfant qui doute, et se replie et ne veut pas;
je repousse et jtreins, de mes genoux et de mes bras,
perdument, de toute ma peur convulsive,
lapproche du brlant mystre qui me tue . . .
Et le courant de feu memporte la drive.
Et lEspoir exil chante sur lautre rive.
...
Ami, lorsque je viens toi,

je tavoue en un cri mon dlirant moi.
Quimportent ton front dur et ton me trangre?
Le dieu que jattendais, jen ai bris lautel.
A ta bouche, ma soif que rien ne dsaltre
a bu les volupts dun dlice mortel;
et je livre ta fougue, en vain rpudie;
un amour o survit ma honte extasie.
Marcel Wyseur (18861950)
A poet of Bruges, Marcel Wyseur is a neglected Belgian Symbolist, a

bridge-gure between the oneiric literature of the turn of the century
and the explosive oneiricism of his friend, Michel de Ghelderode. In
Coup dAiles (Gand: Siffer, 1909), Les Cloches de la Flandre (Paris: Perrin, 1918), and
La Flandre Rouge (Paris: Perrin, 1916), Wyseur gave consummate expression to
Rodenbachs dead city theme. With the depredations of the First World War, the
theme gains urgency in La Flandre Rouge, no longer the literary evanescence of cit-
ies of the past, but their actual disappearance, evoked in imagery of melancholy
resignation. The Chapel in the Dunes hinges on a gentle personication, as the
last chapel gazes into the distance and her eyes of afiction / Have lost sight of
the steeples, whose sister she once was. Wyseurs The Spinners is a dream-like
alternation of images culled from the pure surroundings of a lace-maker and omi-
nous interjections of the spinning fates. The suavity of the Flemish provincial
world and the forces of destruction which threaten it are the recurrent modalities
of Wyseurs poetry. In his preface to La Flandre Rouge, Verhaeren praised the poet:
Your strophes move or stand still, drag or y. They have a soul independent of the
words which they enclose. Verhaeren saw Wyseur as the poet who expresses the
essence of his native land: You carry Flanders within you. It is in your eyes that
see, in your ears that hear, and in your ngers that write.
The Spinners
from The Red Flanders (1916)
Three Spinners: Death, Pain, and Oblivion,

Wind off innity, at the black spinning wheel of time . . .
In front of a window with muslin curtains,

Which frame a cool view of white geraniums,
An elderly lace-maker and all her singing bobbins
Collaborate at perfecting a delicate lace.

Outside, it is a peaceful evening, with bronze-toned shadows,

And the comfortable languor of sweet-scented jasmine,
And the deep velvets, which fall palpitating
From the sky, like a brocade, edged with gold and ermine.

But the lace-work is long and the bobbins docile

From having so often made their way across the webs,
And now their eyes are tired as well . . .
In the closed room, where the light grows dim,

Invisible sleep has touched their eyelids . . .
But tomorrow, the bobbins will not awaken.

Have taken ight this evening . . . The shroud is nished.
The Chapel in the Dunes

from The Red Flanders (1916)
Over there, in the dunes, at the edge of the horizon

That delays the realm of Flanders and renders profound
Its Dream, a chapel, in a rose and white mantle,
Sleeps like a sea-bird on the sand.
Marcel Wyseur 181
Les Fileuses
from La Flandre Rouge
Trois leuses: la Mort, la Douleur et lOubli,

Au rouet noir du temps dvident linni . . .
Devant une fentre rideaux dtamine,

Quencadre un frais dcor de graniums blancs,
La vieille dentelire et ses fuseaux chantants
Travaillent parfaire une dentelle ne.

Dehors, cest le soir calme et lombre purpurine,

Et la bonne langueur des jasmins odorants,
Et les velours profonds, qui tombent palpitants
Du ciel, comme un brocart frang dor et dhermine.
Trois leuses: la Mort, la Douleur et lOublie,

Mais la dentelle est longue, et les fuseaux dociles,

Davoir tant chemin sur les trames subtiles,
Et davoir tant us leurs pauvres yeux, sont las . . .
Et dans la chambre close o steint la lumire,

Le sommeil invisible a touch leur paupire . . .
Mais demain les fuseaux ne sveilleront pas.

Ce soir ont pris leur vol . . . Le linceul est ni.
La Chapelle dans Les Dunes

from La Flandre Rouge
Dans les dunes, l-bas, au seuil de lhorizon

Qui recule la Flandre et qui fait plus profond
Le Rve, une chapelle, mante blanche et rose,
Comme un oiseau de mer sur le sable, repose.
She gazes into the distance and her eyes of afiction

Have lost sight of the steeples, whose sister she once was,
For Nieuport and Caeskerke, Dixmude and Pervyse,
Are dead and the cold has taken their grey ashes.
She is alone, most alone and solemn, innitely,

And the days are endless and endless is the wind,
And endless the sobs of her vain distress . . .
But in the mourning of the choir, a droplet of blood,

Lamp of the tabernacle and lamp of hope,
Like Flanders and ourselves, persists, immensely.
Marcel Wyseur 183
Au loin elle regarde, et ses yeux de douleur

Nont plus vu les clochers dont elle tait la soeur,
Car Nieuport, et Caeskerke, et Dixmude, et Pervyse,
Sont mortes, et le froid a pris leur cendre grise.
Elle est seule, trs seule et grave, inniment,

Et les jours sont sans n, et sans n est le vent,
Et sans n les sanglots de sa vaine navrance . . .
Mais dans le deuil du choeur une goutte de sang,

Lampe du tabernacle et lampe desprance
Comme la Flandre et nous, sobstine, immensment.
Andr Fontainas (18651948)
Andr Fontainas was born in Belgium, but spent most of his childhood
and youth in Paris. During law studies in Brussels, Fontainas was actively
involved in the Belgian literary renaissance and gured prominently in
the 1887 Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique. After his return to Paris, Fontainas contin-
ued to contribute to the Belgian literary journals, La Jeune Belgique, Le Reveil, and
La Wallonie.
The Franco-Belgian writer is the most hermetic and Mallarmean of the group.
The Virgins Look at Themselves in the Mirrors, from the 1894 Nuits
dEpiphanies, is a powerful and original avatar of the recurrent symbolist mirror
reverie. A group of imprisoned maidens is forced to witness the eeting of life as it
passes in shadows across their mirror. Already, this evening, strange visions /
Slide pallid through the thick panes of our wJindows / And are dying in the gold
of our mirrors. In the manner of the prisoners of the platonic cave, the maidens
perceive an intangible, phantom disembodiment, a dream of life, but not life itself.
They are condemned to being seers, absorbed in unreal visions. The mirror is also
a privileged symbol in Fontainas recondite sonnets from the 1895 Les Estuaires
dOmbre, stygian verse haunted by the lusterless waters of oblivion. The central
image of Sonnet VI is a blackened mirror of obsidian and Sonnet VII is domi-
nated by the mirror barren of dreams: Lakes, where will not emerge toward fa-
bled shores, / The grey and heavy plumage of the swans of December. The dark
explorations of the Estuaires dOmbre are succeeded in the later verse of the 1926
Lumires Sensibles by a light-ooded world of ecstatic scintillation. In Your Eyes,
the vision of love mirrors the joy of the beloved as she witnesses the luminous
laughter of the hour, the brightness of blue waves and its ight of birds. The
rich and varied poetry of Andr Fontainas has been collected in Choix de Pomes
(Paris: Mercure de France; 1950).
Jealousy
Seduction of eyes, charm of my youth,

You wish to vanish in the thick cloud
Of distant memories, which y away in peace,
Without hope of their former grace reviving.
Your rose and purple lip, arched with nesse,

Derided the anguish you used to shroud me,
While at your knees, I groveled, begging
The only divine power acknowledged by my heart!
And your cold laughter burst out and my body

Knew it was failing and my senses were dead
Under the weight of sorrow, weeping in my soul.
Nonetheless, xed upon your laced corset, my eyes

Avidly followed, seized by an infamous longing,
The ray of furtive sunlight that broke into desire.
The Virgins Look at Themselves in the Mirrors

from Nights of Epiphanies (1894)
At our windows, at our mirrors,

The sun is dying in last kisses of light,
And the wide orb is inaming the dark forest,
The glade, over there, toward the City and the Sea.
Already, this evening, strange visions
Slide pallid through the thick panes of our windows
And are dying in the gold of our mirrors.
Riders galloping on horse-back,
To what hour of fate? o Kings! and what hopes
Guide you through the nights to our dim mirrors,
Where the ashes of your helmets are dying?
The hour has come, alas,
In the nocturnal malice of the forests,
Of quivering anguish and hidden ambush.
In our windows, in our mirrors,
O proud riders! your specters have passed,
But toward the dark thickets, under ash trees, the beeches,
Andr Fontainas 187
Jalousie
O volupt des yeux, charme de ma jeunesse,

Tu veux te dissiper dans le nuage pais
Des souvenirs lointains qui senvolent en paix,
Sans que leur grce antique un seul instant renaisse!
Ta lvre pourpre-rose arque avec nesse

Me raillait des douleurs dont tu menveloppais,
Tandis qu tes genoux, suppliant, je rampais,
O seul pouvoir divin que mon coeur reconnaisse!
Et ton rire clatait froidement; et mon corps

Se sentait dfaillir et mes sens taient morts
Sous le poids du chagrin qui pleurait en mon me,
Et, cependant, mes yeux, xs sur ton corset,

Suivaient avidement, pris dune envie infme,
Le rayon de soleil furtif qui sy glissait.
Les Vierges se Mirent dans les Miroirs

from Nuits DEpiphanies (1894)
A nos fentres, nos miroirs

Le soleil agonise en baisers de lumire,
Et l-bas lorbe large embrase la clairire
De la fort obscure vers la Ville et vers la Mer.
Dj dtranges visions ce soir
Glissent ples aux vitraux lourds de nos fentres
Et se meurent en lor de nos miroirs.
Chevauches
Vers quelle destine? Rois! et quels espoirs
Vous guident par la nuit vers nos ternes miroirs
O les clairs de vos cimiers se meurent?
Hlas, cest lheure,
En la mchancet nocturne des forts,
De langoisse perdue et dembches caches.
Dans nos fentres, dans nos miroirs
O chevaucheurs hautains! vos spectres ont pass,
Mais vers les halliers noirs sous les frnes, les htres,
And the oaks of the taciturn forests of evening;

In vain, from our windows,
Toward you, whom we had dreamt the Kings of our hope,
We offered our hopeful gestures, only to the twilight;
Phantoms of our mirrors,
Phantoms, now, of the past,
Our eyes have sought you in the gold of our mirrors,
With the startled kisses of the restless light,
As far as the reected gleam of the glade,
In the gold of our mirrors or of ancient windows.
The Estuaries of Shadows VI

Flowers, the hope of crosses, the gleam of red gold,

Their vows, ancient otilla in the breeze of sea-faring skies,
Kneel at the threshold, where ascend, Pilgrims,
With your voices, the bronze voices of the bell-towers.
The daily round of useless life,

Souls of love, and by which serene miracles,
Blossomed, in the sad eld watered by your grief,
Bright corollas, wreathing the peristyle.
The dark river of oblivion, where our cypress trees plunge,

Turns the thick gravel of Dream and the Regrets
Beneath the blackened mirror of its obsidian:
Forsake a vain dream and your senseless vows,

Exiled stranger, become a herdsman in Sogdiane,
Dreams are dangerous and to be alive is enough.
Andr Fontainas 189
Les chnes des forts taciturnes de soir,

En vain de nos fentres
Vers vous que nous rvions les Rois de notre espoir
Nous fmes au crpuscule un geste despoir.
O fantmes de nos miroirs
Fantmes dj du pass
Nos yeux vous ont guetts sous lor de nos miroirs
Aux baisers apeurs des mouvantes lumires
Jusquau rve ret de la clairire
Dans lor de nos miroirs ou dantiques fentres.
Les Estuaires de lOmbre VI

Fleurs, tout lespoir des croix, et lor roux y rutile,

Leurs voeux, ottille ancienne au vent des cieux marins
Sagenouillent au seuil do montent, Plerins,
Avec vos voix les voix dairain dun campanile.
Lennui quotidien de la vie inutile,

Ames damour, et par quels miracles sereins,
Eclt, du triste champ quarrosaient vos chagrins,
Claires corolles en guirlande au pristyle.
Le euve doubli sombre o plongent nos cyprs

Roule lpais gravier du Rve et des Regrets
Sous le miroir noirci de son obsidiane:
Dlaisse un songe vain et tes voeux insenss,

Etranger quun exil t ptre en Sogdiane,
Le rve est malfaisant et vivre cest assez.
The Estuaries of Shadows VIII

I think of You. Sad shivers in the shadows. The amber

Shivers in the bare mirror of our cold dreams,
Lakes, where will not emerge toward fabled shores,
The grey and heavy plumage of the swans of December.
Secure the house of destiny, where the Other contorts

The evil sweetness of her ideal: those
Whom she will wordlessly strangle for the blue mirages,
Will never again be reborn on the cold walls of my chamber.
And You, for your heraldry was of ancient blue and gold,
Were they not yours, the ngers that scattered the treasure
Of their shining petals to the sea of lusterless water?
Night, which a lightning ashYou!burns with sudden

owers,
What rivers of green oblivion have silenced among their own,
Elated with perfumes, the voices of our hopes?
Your Eyes
from Palpable Light (1926)
This morning, you said: How beautiful is the sea!

Tender utter of birds, which hover over the water,
The luminous laughter of the hour sparkles
With the brightness of blue waves and its ight of birds.
A quivering wing in the immense sky

Climbs, lengthens, thrills. The waves
Swell, with universal splendor, all of
Space, enraptured beneath an unborn song.
I watch, in your eyes, the faithful ecstasy

Whereby is born, in your voice, the azure, the birds;
Your eyes repeat: The sea is lovely!
And I answer with a smile that reects in your eyes.
Andr Fontainas 191
Les Estuaires de lOmbre VIII

Je songe Toi. Frissons tristes dans lombre, lambre

Frissonne au miroir nu de nos rves frileux,
Lacs do nmergeront vers les bords fabuleux
Les lourds plumages gris des cygnes de dcembre.
La maison du destin est sre o lAutre cambre

La mauvaise douceur de son idal: eux
Quelle trangla muets pour les mirages bleus
Ne pourront pas renatre aux murs froids de ma chambre.
Et Toi, car ton blason fut dazur vieux et dor,

Nes-tu de qui les doigts ont sem le trsor
De leurs ptales clairs la mer aux eaux mates?
Nuit quun claircest Toi!brle de brusques eurs,

Quels euves doubli vert ont t parmi les leurs
Les voix de nos espoirs enivrs daromates?
Tes Yeux
from Lumire Sensible (1926)
Tu disais ce matin: Que la mer est belle!

Tendre moi doiseaux qui planent sur les eaux,
Le rire lumineux de lheure tincelle
De lclat de lazur au vol des oiseaux.
Dans le ciel immense un frmissement daile

Monte, se prolonge, palpite. Les eaux
Emplissent dune spendeur universelle
Lespace pm sous quels chants inclos.
Jobserve dans tes yeux lextase dle

Qui fait natre ta voix lazur, les oiseaux;
Ils rpetent, tes yeux: Que la mer est belle
Et je rponds toujours: Que tes yeux sont beaux!
v Max Elskamp
Selections from:
Beneath the Tents of the Exodus
Sous les Tentes de lExode (1921)
The Song of the Rue Saint-Paul
La Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul(1922)
Aegri Somnia (1924)
Max Elskamp (18621932)
Commentary
Like Georges Rodenbach, for whom Bruges was the space of poetry,
Max Elskamp is also a poet of place. His realm of the imagination, ren-
dered mythic and interiorized, was his birthplace, the port city of Ant-
werp. Elskamp spent his early years in the parish of St. Paul and most of his life
in his familys vast mansion on Leopold Street, surrounded by the collections of
orientalia and old navigational equipment which fueled his reverie. In his early
collections, Enluminures and La Louange de la Vie, both published in 1898, Els-
kamp evokes an Antwerp which is a series of villages, inhabited by simple folk.
The language used in these poems is naive and archaic in mood, suffused with
the rhythms of folksongs. The seemingly simple style was intended to convey
the spiritual candor of the populace, living in a harmonious and natural world,
rooted in the religious calendar. Ten years of silence followed these volumes,
during which Elskamp collected Flemish folklore and engaged in study of Bud-
dhism. Following a bitter period of exile in Holland during the First World
War, Elskamp underwent a remarkable resurgence of poetic creation. The years
1920 1924 mark the appearance of successive volumes of symbolist poetry, Sous
les tentes de lexode (1921), La Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul (1922), Les Chansons
Dsabuses (1922), Les Dlectations Moroses (1923), Maya (1923), and Aegri Somnia
(1924). In these works, Elskamp, like the Verhaeren of the 1880s, has fashioned
a highly idiosyncratic French, rich in distorted syntax, ellipsis, neologisms, sup-
pression of articles, and succinct lines meant to convey moments of vision. The
purity of the legendary past gives way in the Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul to the
teeming life of the present. The atmosphere of the port is the prevailing theme,
but the ubiquity of the harbour also leads the poet to evoke distant and exotic
realms in a series of dream voyages. Spaces of suspended time are found at both
axes of Elskamps imagination. The brothel in the seventh poem of the Rue
Saint-Paul is a place of waiting, dominated by a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge
stretched in suspension. The violet islands found at the edge of the world in
Aegri Somnia are places where so many pasts are worn away / In dark oblivion
of everlasting presents. Throughout Elskamps late period, scenes of Flemish
life alternate with evocations of beloved women, oriental fantasies, and poems
inspired by objects, porcelains and silks, which are pieces of music for the
eye. The last ten years of Elskamps life were spent in syphilitic madness and
paranoid rage.
Max Elskamp 195
The poetry of Max Elskamp:
Oeuvres Compltes (Paris: Seghers, 1967).

La Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul, ed. Paul Gorceix. (Bruxelles: Labor, 1987).
Chansons et Enluminures. (Bruxelles: Jacques Antoine, 1980).
In Memoriam
from Beneath the Tents of the Exodus
In this land, in this land,

My God, where we have wasted away,
My God, where we have endured pain,

Torn even by the sky and the sea,
In this land, for us so drawn out,

With dejected waiting and with renunciation,
From day to day, for seasons,

And then for months and then for years;
In this land that received us

Fraught with bitterness and care,
Poisoned with loathing and with doubt,

Feet so bloodstained from the roadways,
Burdened with mourning, dressed in tears,

Eyes screwed tight, wounded by magic spell,
And a bitter mouth, deafened ears,

Bursting heart and a soul weighted down;
In this land, for us so slow

In its welcome, both with face and accent,
Mauve and grey as an autumn,

In a remote world, lost among men;
In this very foreign land,

Where we never learned to love,
Which by rule or mistrust,
Our hearts turned into deep silences,
In this land, for us so cold,

From the bread to the water that was ours,
And for eyes and for hearing,
Peevish and melancholy:
Max Elskamp 197
In Memoriam
from Sous les Tentes de lExode
En ce pays, en ce pays,
Mon Dieu, o nous avons langui,
Mon Dieu, o nous avons souffert

Mme du ciel et de la mer,
En ce pays qui nous fut long

Dattente morne et dabandon
Au jour le jour, dans des saisons,

Et puis des mois, et puis des ans;
En ce pays qui nous a pris

Pleins damertume et de soucis,
Aigris de haines et de doutes

Et pieds tout saignants de la route,
Chargs de deuil, vtus de larmes,

Yeux lovs comme sous un charme,
Et bouche amre, oreilles sourdes,

Gros le coeur et lme si lourde;
En ce pays qui nous fut lent

Daccueil, de visage et daccent,
Et mauve et gris comme une automne

Au monde loin parmi les hommes;
En ce pays trs tranger

O nous navons pas su aimer
Et qui, par rgle ou dance,

Si tt en nous sest fait silence;
En ce pays qui nous fut froid,

Du pain quon mange leau quon boit,
Et pour les yeux, et pour loue,

Morose et de mlancolie:
Wavering daylight, puritan sky,

Our eyes have often seen you,
And voices of the water, lost in the air,

You, our ears, so often heard!
In this land, too far into the ocean,

Where our hearts never opened,
Where hard, and secret, and closed,

We hated, more than loved,
In this land, breeding merchants,

Where we never had a chance,
In this land of preachers

To whom we hardly listened,
In this land, alas, where we were,

In this land where we lived,
Weary souls, undeceived,

Bearing our thoughts like a cross;
My God, such dark days of life,

My God, so much suffering withstood,
In this land, in this land,

Where we languished in this way,
Sharing, even unto our esh,

Our wounds and our misery,
It was the world that changed,

Paradise that we won:
We lived like brothers,

Throughout the months of that war.
Max Elskamp 199
Jour indcis, ciel protestant.

Nos yeux, laurez-vous vu souvent,
Et voix des eaux dans lair perdues,

Vous, nos oreilles, entendues!
En ce pays trop de la mer,

O nos coeurs ne se sont ouverts.
O durs, et secrets, et ferms,

Nous avons plus ha quaim,
En ce pays trop de marchands

O nous navons pas achet,
En ce pays de prdicants
Que nous avons mal couts,
En ce pays, las! o nous fmes,

En ce pays o nous vcmes,
Ames lasses, dsabuses,

Portant comme croix nos penses;
Mon Dieu des jours noirs de la vie,

Mon Dieu des souffrances subies,
En ce pays, en ce pays,
Ainsi o nous avons langui,
Les partageant jusqu la chair,

Nos blessures et nos misres,
Cest le monde qui a chang,

Le paradis quon a gagn:
On a vcu comme des frres

Pendant les mois de cette guerre.
no. 7
Song of the Rue Saint-Paul
This street sets out

To nd the docks,
Holes, dens,
Where the sailors go.
Houses with curtains,

Lowered, but which move,
Filtering a closed day
Of scarlet light.
All those English girls

Preoccupied with downing drinks,
Readying themselves for love,
With silken tights,
Throughout the day, which weighs

Outside and so heavy,
Throughout the summer night,
Those who sell love.
And all the varieties of liquor

To choose, like the esh,
Danish aquavit,
Bitter Greek anis,
Irish Whiskey,
American rum,
Japanese sake,
Opium from India.
And mirrors reecting,

In yellow and black,
All the shining copper
Behind the counter.
Women and those who chat,

Bared shoulder,
Or who prefer to rest,
Forever lounging,
Rings on their hands,
Max Elskamp 201
no. 7
from La Chanson de la Rue Saint-Paul
Puis rue qui sen va

Chercher les bassins,
Bouges, galetas,
O vont les marins,
Maisons rideaux
Baisss mais qui bougent,
Filtrant un jour clos
De lumire rouge,
Cest lles anglaises

Occupes boire,
Vtant pour aimer
Des maillots de moire,
Dans le jour qui pse

Dehors et si lourd,
Dans le soir dt
Qui vendent lamour.
Mais liqueurs au choix

Lors comme la chair,
Aquavit danois,
Anis grec amer,
Whiskey irlandais,
Rhum amricain,
Sak japonais,
Opium indien,
Et glaces mirant
En jaune et en noir,
Les cuivres luisants
Au dos du comptoir,
Femmes et qui causent

Les paules nues,
Ou bien se reposent
En long tendues,
Dreaming of bad or worse,

Or nding all of their good
In at last going to sleep,
For time stretches out,

Told in slow hours,
Days spent here
In expectation.
Eyes, like theatrical lights,

Scan the walls,
And at the engravings
Stand still.
You see Vesuvius,

Overcome with re,
Like a vat full of
Hell and Flame.
And red and carmine,

Hanging further on,
The Brooklyn Bridge,
Suspended in the air.
Blue Night
from Aegri Somnia
The night is blue,

The beloved is blond,
There is God,
And then the world,
And the garden

Where you set out
To seek tomorrow,
Which will come.
Max Elskamp 203
Bagues leurs mains,

Rvant mal ou pire,
Ou trouvant leur bien
Enn dormir.
Lors temps qui sespace

Dit en heures lentes,
Et jour qui se passe
Ici dans lattente,
Yeux comme une rampe

Les suivant les murs,
Et sur des estampes
Qui sarrtent durs:
On voit le Vsuve
En feu qui se pme,
Ainsi quune cuve
Denfer et de ammes,
Et rouge et carmin
Plus loin appendu,
Le pont de Brooklyn
Dans lair suspendu.
Nuit Bleue
from Aegri Somnia
La nuit est bleue,

Lamie est blonde,
Il y a Dieu,
Et puis le monde,
Et le jardin
O lon sen va,
Trouver demain
Et qui viendra.
There is the heart

You carry within,
Believing without delusion
All suffering to be dead.
The moon is round,

Arcturus gleams,
And the beloved is blond
She smiles,
You have no idea

At what, at whom,
But with joined hands,
Just as in prayer.
And eyes climbing

High, toward the heavens,
Seek, you would say,
Like wings.
Silence in her,
Silence in yourself,
And then faith,
Which turns to gall,
Newborn doubts
Of love, which binds
Forever
And for life,
And then there is, within the soul

That you carry within,
Something like a woman
Whom you know to be dead.
Max Elskamp 205
Il y a coeur
En soi quon porte,
Croyant sans leurre,
La douleur morte;
La lune est ronde,

Arturus luit,
Et lamie blonde
Elle, sourit,
On ne sait point
A quoi, qui,
Mais jointes mains
Ainsi quon prie,
Et yeux monts
Haut vers le ciel,
Cherche, on dirait,
Comme des ailes.
Silence en elle,
Silence en soi,
Et alors foi
Qui se fait el,
Doute qui nat,

Amour qui lie
Dternit
Et pour la vie,
Cest lors dans lme

En soi quon porte,
Comme une femme
Quon saurait morte.
Silks
from Aegri Somnia
A peacock in a Persian garden,

A peacock fans its tail and women laugh
To see it, like a white sun,

Change the grass to shining brightness,
Some, seated on a bench,

In their veils the color of rain,
And others, their hair in the wind,

In dresses that tell of saffron.
A stream is there, where the water

Seems, you would say, to turn to roses,
A bridge crosses, drolly,

Lolling on spindly pilings,
And the sky laughs like a faun,

Who knows at what or at whom,
With great yellow sunspots,
Like peelings from a fruit.
Then further, on a terrace,

The green lords taking tea
From the back, prole, and full-face,

All drinking with dignity,
Meanwhile, with y-swats,

Because of the month and the season,
Servants expedite the dubious spiders,

Come to rest on the bowls.
But the suavity of silks,

Which marry with the caressing ngers,
Just like a body, and sent from

The radiant workshops of Isphahan,
Max Elskamp 207
Soieries
from Aegri Somnia
Un paon dans un jardin persan,

Un paon roue, et des femmes rient,
De le voir, comme un soleil blanc,

Dans lherbe faire clart luie,
Les unes sises sur un banc

En leurs voiles couleur de pluie,
Et les autres, cheveux au vent,

En robes disant le safran.
Une rivire est l dont leau

Semble, on dirait, ainsi que rose,
Un pont la traverse, falot,

Sur des pilotis, qui repose,
Et le ciel rit ainsi quun faune
On ne sait pas de quoi, de qui,
Avec de grandes taches jaunes

Comme des pelures de fruit.
Or plus loin, sur une terrasse,

Des Seigneurs verts prennent le th
De dos, de prol ou de face,

Et boivent avec gravit,
Tandis quavec des chasse-mouches,

A cause du mois de lanne,
Des servants tuent araignes louches,

Venues sur les bols se poser.
Mais douceur alors des soieries

Qupousent les doigts les touchant,
Ainsi quune chair, et sorties

Des clairs ateliers dIspahan,
These are pieces of music for the eyes,

And also velvet for the ngers,
And Persia recounted beneath the skies

By a peacock as white as faith.
The Islands
from Aegri Somnia
Violet islands dream,

Over there, at the edge of the blue world,
Where the leaning schooners set forth
White sails beneath the skies,
Toward the lost ports, conrmed

In perfumes of swooning esh,
In coral beneath the light
And distant greens of the palm groves.
Huts, raising their roofs of straw

Beneath the golden rain of the sun,
Sea-cucumber, copra, nacre, tortoiseshell,
Goods of trade and vermilion,
Are sold and bought at evening

After the burning hours,
In the presence of the sea, as it goes down
Like blood along the shores,
Their breeze also passes sometimes,

Fanning the lethargy of the sky,
It is in glory of weary brightness
That the daylight is fading, resplendent.
Then night, creating mute life,

Over there, even near the breakers,
Moon that climbs, full, clean,
Max Elskamp 209
Ce sont musiques pour les yeux,

Et velours aussi pour les doigts,
Et Perse dite sous les cieux,

Par un paon blanc comme la foi.
Les Iles
from Aegri Somnia
Des les rvent violettes

L-bas, au bout du monde bleu.
O sen vont penches les golettes
A voiles blanches sous les cieux,
Vers les ports perdus qui savrent

Dans des senteurs de chair pme,
En les coraux sous la lumire
Et vertes loin, des palmeraies.
Cases montant leurs toits de paille

Sous la pluie dore du soleil,
Tripang, copra, nacres, caille,
Choses de trac et vermeilles
Que lon achte et que lon vend

De soir, aprs les heures chaudes,
Devant la mer et qui descend
Comme du sang le long des ctes,
Et brise alors parfois qui passe

ventant le ciel endormi,
Cest en gloire de clarts lasses
Le jour qui se meurt resplendi.
Mais nuit lors, qui fait vie muette,

L-bas, mme autour des brisants,
Lune qui monte pleine et nette
In the air, sweet-smelling with perfumes.

Passing hour, so far from the world,
Since time doesnt matter any longer,
And so many pasts are worn away
In dark oblivion of everlasting presents.

Those are the violet islands,
Over there, at the edge of the summer seas,
Those are the violet islands,
Dreaming of eternal days.
Salome
from Aegri Somnia
It is in the evenings,
Sometimes harsh,
When, in theaters,
You kill time,
And you lean

To see them better
Pink or white,
Blond or dark,
In the light,
And their aromas
Of owers of esh
Those who dance
To the music,
Quick or slow,
With rhythmic step,
And smiling,
Mimes, dancers,
And ballerinas,
Sweet, mocking,
Or sometimes feline.
Max Elskamp 211
Dans lair de parfums odorant,

Heure au monde si loin qui passe
Que plus il nimporte du temps,
Et que cest passs qui seffacent
En loubli mme du prsent;

Ce sont des les violettes,
L-bas, au bout des mers dt,
Ce sont des les violettes
Qui rvent l dternit.
Salome
from Aegri Somnia
Cest dans les soirs

Parfois martres,
O, au thtre
On va sasseoir,
Et quon se penche
Pour mieux les voir
Roses ou blanches,
Blondes ou noires,
Dans la lumire
Et leurs fragrances
De eurs de chair
Celles qui dansent,
Sur des musiques

Vites ou lentes,
A pas rythmiques,
Et souriantes,
Mimes, danseuses,
Et ballerines,
Douces, railleuses,
Ou bien flines.
When during the ballet,

Whether long, whether short,
Gracious, vivacious,
And sometimes heavy,
Sudden things
And those conjured
From distant times,
Without question,
It is over there, distant,

In Galilee,
In the serene air
When evening has fallen,
A palace of gold
In the sunset,
Where horns sound,
Where songs climb,
And then lances,

Soldiers and guards,
Banquet and dance,
Where watches,
Darkly, Antiphas,
With downcast eyes.
But dancing there,
Salome,
Lips offered,
Arms uplifted,
The breasts nude
And shadowed with gold,
While upon
A silver dish,
Following the white
Wall of the fortress,
A soldier approaches,
With rigid ngers,
Bearing in his hands
The head, once John.
Max Elskamp 213
Mais lors ballet

Ou long, ou court,
Gracieux, gai,
Et parfois lourd,
Choses soudain
Et qui svoquent
De temps lointains
Sans quivoques,
Cest l-bas loin

En Galile,
En lair serein
Au soir tomb.
Un palais dor
Dans le couchant,
O sonnent cors,
O montent chants,
Et puis des lances,

Soldats et gardes,
Banquet et danse
Et que regarde
Sombre, Antipas
Les yeux baisss.
Mais dansant l
Cest Salom
Lvres tendues,
Les bras dresss,
Et les seins nus
Et dor ombrs,
Tandis que sur

Un plat dargent,
Le long du mur
Blanc du redan,
Un soldat vient
Et les doigts raides,
Portant aux mains,
De Jean, la tte.
vi Charles Van Lerberghe
Selections from:
The Song of Eve
La Chanson dEve
1904
Charles Van Lerberghe (18611907)
Commentary
Charles Van Lerberghe studied with Maurice Maeterlinck and Gregoire

Le Roy at the Jesuit College Sainte-Barbe in Ghent, the same school
where Georges Rodenbach and Emile Verhaeren had been educated.
Under the tutelage of Rodenbach, Lerberghe made his literary debut with La
Jeune Belgique, but soon became allied with La Wallonie, a journal more receptive
to symbolist innovations in versication. In 1889, Lerberghe completed a proto-
Symbolist play, Les Flaireurs, which, like Maeterlincks more ominous LIntruse, is
concerned with anguished waiting for death. It was, however, as a poet that Ler-
berghe has made his mark with two collections, Entrevisions (1898) and a master-
work of the Symbolist movement, La Chanson dEve (begun in 1899 and com-
pleted in 1904).
La Chanson dEve is a collection in the truest sense, a system of associations,
each poem linked to the others in a sustained and cyclical exploration of a poetic
consciousness awakening to the nascent world. Lerberghes Eve is a poet, the pri-
mal poet like Rilkes Orpheus or Valerys Amphion, who conceives and sings the
world. In perfect solitude, Lerberghes virgin Eve pronounces her pure word as
she wanders a plurality of Edens, pastoral landscapes of the soul evoked in im-
agery of dazzling light and mobile shadows. She is, at once, the Idealist Narcissus,
identifying with all she encounters, and Psyche, engaged in a quest for knowledge
of self and universe. In her explorations, she is accompanied by her radiant an-
gels, intermediaries between self and world, guiding her through experiences
with the elements. Water, identied with delving exploration of interiority, air,
suggestive of freedom, dispersion, and mobility, and re, element of ickering
metamorphosis, are dominant sources of imagery. Several moods and registers of
experience are recurrent. In one mood, there is a lulled harmony between paradisal
nature and persona, as in But one night Venus came to bring me roses. The
poems of this type are often associated with a gentle setting of dawn or twilight
and with experiences of sleep, dream, and diffuse sensuality. In another mood,
there is a dionysiac, triumphant identication of self and world: Dove! Dove!
Enchanted Dove! or Be absolved by my decree. In poems of this type, Eve is an
intoxicated dancer, reeling with power, a Nietzschean gure who asserts the force
of her will, her lack of guilt, and her creative drive. There is a third mood in the
collection, a fearful fascination with non-being: I crossed the ardent thicket or
Along the pale waters, in which Lerberghe presents landscapes of arrested time,
symbolist other worlds within the other world of Eden. Allied to this is a fourth
Charles Van Lerberghe 217
mood in which Eve welcomes death as a form of self-forgetfulness and pantheistic

reabsortion into the universe: Come death, dust of stars . . . Lerberghes poet-
guration awakens to the world, its joy, splendor, but also its inherent suffering.
She is, at once, the enchanted, marveling at all she sees, and the enchantress, ren-
dering her wonder in the incantation of verse. She establishes with her word a
bond between herself and the innite and then disappears into her song.
Lerberghes Eve merges with the world she has celebrated, as the poet merges into
his poem. Lerberghes collection is a hymn to the immortality of Song, the crea-
tive act, and also a hymn to mutability, the poets ability to render reality malleable
and uid, metamorphosis as the essence of poetry.
The Poetry of Charles Van Lerberghe:
Entrevisions. (Bruxelles: Nouvelle Socit dEditions, 1926).

La Chanson dEve. (Bruxelles: Jacques Antoine, 1980).
Gaze into our depths; we are the Emerald . . .
Gaze into our depths; we are the Emerald,

Everlasting and leafy, like the soul of the oceans,
Where perfumes roam through the warm night,
And ows the wave of the great angels of the wind.
We are the enormous and murmurous forest,

Overowing with dazzled shadows and somber splendor,
Breathing and living, where a thousand golden birds sing,
Where the peaks burst into a foam of owers.
Ever since the original breath and the rst dawn,

With ceaseless striving and endless desire,
Together we climb from the entrails of the earth
Toward that wondrous treasure which you alone have reached.
Together, we its voice, we its deep soul,

Within this vast foliage, turned green ever more,
We have dreamed all of the dreams on earth
And have grown old on the shores of the sun.
Place your pale diadem . . .
Place your pale diadem

Upon my head, ray
Of the pure moonlight.
And leave your white veil
Over my shoulders.
Then place your virginal

Word
Upon my lips.
And so, stay,

Leave a trail between my frail ngers,
Which I raise,
A ray,
Or the scepter of my kingdom.
Regarde au fond de nous: nous sommes lEmeraude . . .
Regarde au fond de nous: nous sommes lEmeraude

Eternelle, et feuillue, et qui semble une mer,
O rdent des parfums travers la nuit chaude,
O circule le ot des grands anges de lair.
Nous sommes la fort norme et murmurante,

Pleine dombre blouie et de sombre splendeur,
Qui respire et qui vit, o mille oiseaux dor chantent,
Et dont la cime clate en cumes de eurs.
Depuis le premier soufe et laurore premire,

Dun effort inlassable et dun dsir sans n,
Ensemble, nous montons des antres de la terre,
Vers ce but merveilleux que toi seule as atteint.
Ensemble, nous sa voix, nous son me profonde,

Dans ce feuillage immense, jamais reverdi,
Nous avons abrit tous les rves du monde,
Et cest dans le soleil que nous avons grandi.
Mets sur mon front . . .
Mets sur mon front

Ton pur diadme, rayon
De la lune ple,
Et ton blanc voile
Sur mes paules.
Mets ta parole
Virginale
Sur mes lvres.
Et sois,
Entre mes frles doigts
Que je lve,
O rayon,
Le sceptre de mon royaume!
My resonant angels came . . .
My resonant angels came

Among the roses of sunrise,
Like a peal of laughter in the air

Or breezes over the waves.
I held fast, my hands clasped before them,

And silently stood still.
They greeted me with the wind of their wings,

And fell to my knees.
They said: Behold your handmaids,

As their breaths brushed my body.
Their lips did not sing with the rst light,

Nothing but a kiss were their words.
My joyous angels came

In the great, diaphanous morning,
Closing the world to my eyes

With a horizon of snow and ame.
And from my white feet to my golden head

They scattered me with owers,
Tracing great waves,

Bright spirals of splendor.
Then quivering, bewinged over me,

In my entirety and all of them at once,
To the depth of their thirst-corrupted souls,

Languorously, gently, like a shadow, drank me in.
Dentre les roses de laurore . . .
Dentre les roses de laurore,

Elles sont venues, mes anges sonores.
Ils sont venus comme un rire dans lair,

Et comme des soufes sur la mer.
Je me tenais, mains jointes devant elles,

Silencieuse, immobile et debout.
Ils mont salue du vent de leurs ailes,

Et sont tombs mes genoux.
Elles mont dit: Voici tes servantes.

Dj leurs bouches mefeuraient.
Leurs lvres ntaient pas de celles qui chantent;

Leurs paroles ntaient quun baiser.
Dans le grand matin diaphane,

Ils sont venus, mes anges joyeux.
Dun horizon de neige et de amme

Ils ont ferm le monde mes yeux.
De mes pieds clairs ma tte blonde

Toute par eux jonche de eurs,
Ils ont trac de grandes ondes,

Et des spirales de splendeur.
Puis frmissants, ails sur moi,

Mont tout entire et tous la fois,
Au fond de leurs mes altres,

Longuement, doucement, comme une ombre, aspire.
Do you still remember . . .
Do you still remember,

O my unicorn,
A wondrous night,
Deep in the great woods,
It was I who took you;
I was as wild as you.
Without an arrow, without a dart,

With a single glance
Of my childs eyes,
I subdued you;
And you came, meek as a fawn,
To stretch out in the grass,
At my white feet,
Like my shadow.
Only a virgin could take you.
And now you repose,

O my unicorn,
In this little garden,
By my own hands enclosed
With a hedge of roses,
And all surrounded by boundless Eden.
And I fold my arms,

Around your neck,
My gentle beast, full of grace,
And lean my head against your head,
For fear my voice might wake you.
But one night, Venus came to bring me roses . . .
But one night, Venus came to bring me roses.

It was in the grove, where I was yet asleep.
She was nude and blond, sparkling, roseate,
And all of the somber air around her was of gold.
In the warm night there was a sudden ight of doves.

Le sais-tu encore, O ma Licorne?
Le sais-tu encore,
O ma Licorne?
Une nuit merveilleuse,
Au fond des grands bois,
Cest moi qui tai prise;
Jtais farouche comme toi.
Sans une che, sans un dard,

Dun seul regard
De mes yeux denfant,
Je tai soumise;
Et tu vins, douce comme un faon,
Dans lherbe ttendre,
A mes pieds blancs,
Comme mon ombre.
Seule, une vierge pouvait te prendre.
A prsent, tu reposes,
O ma Licorne
En ce petit jardin,
Que jai clos de mes mains
Dune haie de roses,
Et quenveloppe lEden sans bornes.
Et jenlace mes bras

Autour de ton cou,
Ma douce bte, pleine de grce,
Et pose ma tte contre ta tte,
Pour que ma voix ne te trouble pas.
Or, Vnus, une nuit, vint mapporter des roses . . .
Or, Vnus, une nuit, vint mapporter des roses.

Ctait dans le bosquet o je dormais encor.
Elle tait nue, et blonde, tincelante et rose,
Et tout lair sombre autour delle tait dor.
Dans la nuit chaude il volait des colombes.

In unison, her lovely nymphs,

They wore purple girdles
Beneath their breasts and
Roses in their hair
Caused under ying ngers
Their shining lyres to resound.
And one proclaimed: O Queen! look,

She awakens, she laughs, surprised.
She resembles you on the day you were born
Of the foam dancing on waves of the vernal seas.
Look at her. Her dazzled eyes are unaware
Of why you smile and why we have come
With owers, divine Venus, and with songs,
From the depth of our night to salute her dawn;
And yet, she is like the very image of Love.
And I said to her: Gracious Queen,

How that name, of which my lips rst learned
The dazzling murmur,
Suavely resounds in the silence.
And like your presence, that word
Has perfumed the night!
Before you, my angels reverently kneel.
And I adore you and I seek in my heart
Words that would be,
Like your grace and beauty, divine.
But alas, our human souls

Can only tell their bliss,
Their afictions,
In an exquisite murmur and in tears . . .
And all at once, in the sound of my voice,

Through the air reeling with song and with roses,
She, who with her breath quickens all things,
Gently approached me . . .
And I felt upon my throbbing heart all on re

Something like the alighting of lips.
Ses belles nymphes, la fois,

Elles avaient des ceintures
De pourpre sous les seins,
Et des roses dans leurs chevelures,
Firent, sous leurs agiles doigts,
Rsonner des lyres:
Et lune dit: O reine! vois,

Elle sveille, elle rit, tonne.
Elle est semblable toi, au jour o tu es ne
De lcume des eaux sur la mer du printemps.
Comme toi elle est blonde, et ce nest quune enfant.
Regarde-la. Ses yeux merveills ignorent
Pourquoi tu lui souris et pourquoi nous venons,
Vnus divine, avec des eurs et des chansons,
Du fond de notre nuit saluer son aurore;
Et pourtant elle est comme une soeur de lAmour.
Et je lui dis: O reine,

Comme ce nom dont mes lvres apprennent
Le murmure bloui,
Suavement sonne dans le silence,
Et comme ta prsence
A parfum la nuit!
Devant toi mes anges sinclinent.
Et je tadore, et je cherche en mon coeur
Des paroles qui soient,
Comme ta grce et ta beaut, divines.
Mais, hlas! nos mes humaines

Nont pour dire leurs bonheurs,
Comme leurs peines,
Quun murmure ineffable, et des pleurs. . . . .
Et, tout coup, dans le son de ma voix,

A travers lair plein de chants et de roses,
Celle qui, de son soufe, anime toutes choses,
Doucement vint vers moi. . . . .
Et je sentis sur mon coeur embras

Comme des lvres se poser.
Close now, magic ring . . .
Close now, magic ring,

Close now, wall of light
Now as I sing,
Fence of haze,
Gate of moonlight,
Close now and hold her tight.
Step by step; trace by trace,

We now close tight this magic space.
And may her angels never enter.
In your palace I am locked away,

What do you want of me, woodland sprites?
For you did I not on the banks of the spring
Gather vervain and the wild thyme?
We are cold.
Here is my breath, and here my ngers.

Are you warm again?
What more do you ask of me?
Your soul,
That little ame of gold.
Here it is; I grant it freely,

And take my heart as well.
We were chilled; you revived us,
We were starving and you lled us,
And you freely gave your soul.
Would you have in return
Robes of shimmering hue,
Bright wings, robes,
Webs of azure and of moon?
No, I would remain nude,

Like the owers and the angels.
Ferme-toi, cercle enchant . . .
Ferme-toi, cercle enchant.

Ferme-toi, mur de clart
Enceinte de brume,
Porte de lune,
Ferme-toi, et garde-la.
Trace trace, et pas pas,

Fermons lespace,
Et que ses anges nentrent pas.
Dans votre palais

Je suis enferme
Que me voulez-vous, petites fes?
Nai-je pour vous, prs des fontaines,
Cueilli la verveine et le serpolet?
Nous avons froid.
Voici mon soufe, voici mes doigts.

Etes-vous rchauffes?
Et que demandez-vous encore?
Ton me,
Cette petite amme dor.
La voici; je vous la donne,

Et prenez mon coeur aussi.
Nous avions froid, tu nous as rchauffes,

Nous avions faim, tu nous as rassasies,
Et tu nous as donn ton me.
Veux-tu, en change,
Des robes couleur de larc-en-ciel,
Comme des ailes, des robes tissues
Dazur et de lune?
Non, je veux rester nue,

Comme les eurs, et comme les anges.
We would give you, if you will,

Treasures unknown still
Hidden below ground
In caverns dire:
The precious stones.
Some shine in our hair,
Like night moths
Of azure and of re.
No, I scorn those underground things.
Would you have eyes that shine like the dawn,

In darkness?
No, I seek only that which ies away,

In brightness.
Would you be changed,

Into a bird, a buttery,
Into a ame,
Into a ower, a ray of light?
Allow my soul
To be free as you are,
Like the breeze, like re,
Which ares where it will
And yields not even to God.
It will be granted, your guileless desire,

Your delightful desire;
Daughter of mankind, be ever free,
Even of God.
In the unseen,
Our songs, our dances, round you will twine;
Step by step; trace by trace,
We will glide into the space,
Where you will be.
Open now, gate of moonlight,

Fence of haze,
And magic ring,
For now is reborn that odious light,
Which already on earth, the rooster does sing.
Nous te donnerons, si tu veux,

Les trsors futurs cachs sous la terre,
En des grottes obscures:
Ce sont les pierres.
Il en brille dans nos cheveux,
Comme des phalnes
Dazur et de feu.
Non, je ddaigne les choses souterraines.
Veux-tu des yeux qui soient comme laube

Dans lobscurit?
Non, je cherche ce qui se drobe

Dans la clart.
Veux-tu que nous te changions

En un oiseau, un papillon,
En une amme,
En une eur, en un rayon?
Donnez mon me
Dtre libre comme vous,
Comme les airs, comme le feu,
Qui soufe o il veut,
Et nobit pas mme Dieu.
Quil soit accompli le voeu ingnu,

Le voeu adorable!
Fille humaine, sois libre,
Mme de Dieu.
Dans linvisible,
Nos chants et nos danses vont te suivre.
Trace trace, et pas pas,
Nous serons dans lespace
O tu seras.
Ouvre-toi, porte de lune,

Enceinte de brume,
Cercle enchant,
Car voici que renat lodieuse lumire,
Que dj sur la terre
Le coq a chant.
The wave is shivering . . .
The wave is shivering, a silken length of

Mourning drapery, unwinding in the night,
The deep wave, mute and black,
Where the moon suddenly casts its shine.
The moon draws forth from the deeps

Long frail owers, so pale,
That rise, unfurl, and hail
The cold orb of intangible splendor.
Mysteriously opened,
Like a deadly omen,
Upon the wave and the moon, they place
Their white candlesticks, slender and pale.
And it seems to me from beyond life,

Yet, close to my side,
That some strange being is spying on me,
Invisible in the light.
The radiant fruit of gold shimmers . . .
The radiant fruit of gold

Shimmers, swaying in the shadows,
Gleaming between the rustling leaves,
A waiting treasure, long foretold.
It has grown ripe only for you,
Lovely and savoring of paradise,
For what rose could rival its fairness?
Veiled by their wings

The sleeping angels dream . . .
Londe tremble comme une moire de tnbre
Londe tremble comme une moire

De tnbre travers la nuit,
Londe profonde, sourde et noire,
O tout coup la lune luit.
Du fond des eaux la lune attire

De ples, longues, frles eurs,
Qui montent, souvrent et se mirent
Dans son impalpable splendeur.
Mystrieusement closes,
Comme un mortel pressentiment,
Dans londe et la lune elles posent
Leurs longs et ples ambeaux blancs.
Il semble, au del de la vie,

Et cependant mon ct,
Que quelque tre trange mpie,
Invisible dans la clart.
Il luit dans lombre, le beau fruit . . .
Il luit dans lombre,

Le beau fruit dor,
Il luit comme un trsor
Entre ces feuilles.
Cest pour toi quil a mri,
Le beau fruit du paradis.
Quelles roses lui sont pareilles?
Voils de leurs ailes,

Les anges sommeillent . . .
And now the night has come,

Not one star rises in the sky;
Oh! nothing
But the lightest touch
Of your lips . . .
Who could see?
The mild evening breezes caress it as well.
Hear as my song
Whispers in your ear,
Draw near and gather.
The angels drift in their dreams . . .
Be absolved by my decree . . .
Be absolved by my decree
Of all treachery
And of all malice,
O my lovely Serpent, and glide
In peace, a sinuous sunbeam
Among these roses.
For it was you who taught me the truth,

The original secrets of the earth,
The mystery of all created things,
O spirit of light,
Bright spirit of re!
For it was you who made me an equal of God.
O my beautiful Serpent, glide

Among my lilies and rove
Through the roses of my springtime;
Be crowned with bright gold and clothed
With emeralds, topaz, and with diamonds!
Voici que la nuit vient,

Pas une toile ne se lve.
Oh! rien
Quun efeurement
De tes lvres . . .
Qui peut savoir?
Le soufe du soir le touche bien.
coute ma chanson;
Elle murmure ton oreille:
Approche et cueille.
Les anges sommeillent . . .
Sois absous par ma bouche . . .
Sois absous par ma bouche

De toute trahison
Et de toute malice,
Mon beau Serpent, et glisse
En paix, comme un rayon,
Parmi ces roses.
Tu mas appris la belle vrit.
Tu mas appris le secret de la terre

Et lnigme des choses,
Esprit de lumire,
Clair esprit de feu!
Toi par qui je devins une gale de Dieu.
Glisse, mon beau Serpent,

Parmi mes lys, et rde
Entre les roses de mes printemps;
Sois couronn dor clair et vtu dmeraudes,
De topazes et de diamants!
Dove! Dove! Enchanted Dove, . . .
Dove! Dove! Enchanted Dove

That sways around me,
Why are you afraid, white dove?
Hear my voice, dove, my sister.
From the resonant branches
Descend in my dance,
Descend upon my heart, dove of love!
And I dance and I sing and I dance once more,
I dance nude, dazzled and splendid,
Like a serpent in the high grass.
I dance and I rage in the air,
Like a ame from hell.
I dance bewinged, quivering and wild,

In the depth of the living whirlwind,
Whirling in the current that devours me,
The whirlwind in which I descend.
I dance until sated,
With soul drunken, staggering,
With the wine of dance,
And with the wine of my blood.
But how to understand and how to name you . . .
But how to understand and how to name you,

O my ever-changing angels, transforming yourselves ceaselessly
You, in whom there is nothing that remains,
Immutable in itself, one entire day, one single hour?
Emerged from some golden unity, strange and vague,
You are born to perish and to ourish once again
In shapes more shifting than dreams.
You, Breath, you bound forth and become a Sound,
And you, Sound, a ame, and you, Flame, a dawn.
And the air is laden with owers that are not yet,
But have already opened into a sky aglow with rays.
Colombe! Colombe! Colombe enchante . . .
Colombe! Colombe! Colombe enchante

Qui te balances autour de moi,
Pourquoi as-tu peur, colombe blanche?
coute ma voix, colombe, ma soeur.
Entre les branches descends dans ma danse,
Descends sur mon coeur, colombe damour!
Et je danse et je chante, et danse encore.

Je danse nue, blouie et superbe,
Comme un serpent dans les hautes herbes.
Je danse et rampe dans les airs,
Comme une amme de lenfer.
Je danse aile, frmissante et sonore,

Au fond du tourbillon vivant,
Du tourbillon qui me dvore,
Du tourbillon o je descends.
Je danse jusqu ce que jen sois lasse,
Lme enivre et chancelante
Du vin de la danse,
Et du vin de mon sang.
Mais comment vous comprendre . . .
Mais comment vous comprendre et comment vous nommer

O mes Anges mouvants, vous, qui vous transformez
Sans cesse, vous, en qui il nest rien qui demeure
Immuable en soi-mme, un jour, une seule heure?
Sortis de quelque trange et vague unit dor,
Vous naissez pour mourir et pour connatre encor,
En apparences plus changeantes que des songes.
Toi, Soufe, tu tlances et deviens un Son,
Et toi, Son, une amme, et toi, Flamme, une aurore,
Et lair est plein de eurs qui ne sont pas encore,
Et dj ne sont plus quun ciel plein de rayons.
I crossed the ardent forest . . .
I crossed the ardent forest where the foliage,

Like a ame, bent to my step,
Where the blaze then closed around me.
No one. All is still. A wall of stone,
A gaping doorway, a space that reveals
The other land shimmering in another light.
There nothing breathes. Lone, beneath the sun,
An endless pathway of willows, which sweep their
Tired branches along the sleep-laden sand.
All things spellbound with a strange somnolence,
Where light and shade, like the air, remain motionless.
Evening is no more, beyond the threshold.
Elsewhere, tolls the magic hour, when all is clothed
In blue twilight, that ows from stars
Upon my sacred groves. Here, the relentless sun,
Which beams forever an unwavering light.
And yet, what calm delight reigns
In this radiant silence, this untouched
Solitude. Within this dwelling-place, nothing of life.
No bird, in this stiing air,
Could unfurl its weightless wings or let fall
The star of its agile claw upon the sand.
Not a whisper oating on the gentle wind could pass
The threshold where all expires.
The mute owers of paradise, even they,
Clustered, must halt, stunned,
For it is carved in the threshold of stone: Other Land.
There, all noise dies out; even my voice trembles,
Leaps back, frail, as soon as it touches the space.
And over there, it is, my angels say,
That Death invisibly wanders in this divine realm;
And that is the way where life, obscurely, ventures forth.
..........
What does it matter! Here, they are so sweet, my quiet dreams.

They look just like the ones that appear in the night,
When all is at rest, when my joyous heart lifts me
Even above Eden, and I am
On high, in the dark, miraculous sky, the pathway
Of the stars. All has grown heavy. I sleep.
My feet are weighted in their own shining snow.
Jai travers lardent buisson . . .
Jai travers lardent buisson dont le feuillage,

Comme une amme, sest ouvert sur mon passage,
Et dont lembrasement sest referm sur moi.
Personne. Tout est calme. Une enceinte de pierre,
Une porte bante, un espace o lon voit
Un autre monde luire en une autre lumire.
Rien ny respire plus. Seule, sous le soleil,
Une alle innie, et des saules qui laissent
Sur le sable dormant traner leurs branches lasses.
Toutes choses au fond dun trange sommeil,
Et lombre et la clart, comme lair, immobiles.
Ainsi, le soir nest plus au del de ce seuil.

Ailleurs, cest lheure merveilleuse o tout se voile
Du crpuscule bleu qui tombe des toiles
Sur mes bosquets heureux. Ici, le grand jour seul
Qui rayonne jamais dune lumire gale.
Et pourtant quel divin et doux apaisement
Dans ce silence pur, et cette virginale
Solitude! En ces lieux plus rien qui soit vivant.
Pas un oiseau qui dans cet air irrespirable
Ait ouvert ses ailes lgres ou laiss
Ltoile de ses pieds agiles sur le sable.
Pas une haleine qui, dans la brise, ait pass
Ce seuil o tout expire, o jusquaux eurs muettes
Du paradis, en foule, interdites, sarrtent;
Car il est inscrit sur ce seuil de pierre: Ailleurs.
L, tombent tous les bruits, l, ma voix mme a peur,
Et recule aussitt quelle touche lespace;
Et cest par l, disent mes anges, que la Mort,
En ce divin royaume, invisiblement passe,
Et par l que la vie, obscurment, en sort.
..........
Quimporte! Ils sont si doux, ici, mes calmes rves.

Ils ressemblent ceux qui viennent dans la nuit,
Quand tout repose, quand mon coeur heureux mlve
Au-dessus de lEden lui-mme, et que je suis,
L-haut, dans le ciel sombre et merveilleux, la sente
Des toiles: Tout sest appesanti; je dors.
Mes pieds senfoncent dans leur neige tincelante.
How alike they look, those two golden roads!

Perhaps they are one and the same, but seen
From the connes of sleep and of life.
How I long to see myself from over there, standing
Pale and tired, leaning on this doorsill, encircled
By these owers whose fragrance wreathes my dreams.
How strange all things here must seem,
Ever restless, in a ceaseless uproar
Of foliage, wind, and waves! The dread
Of living is so strong, over there; so smiling
The hope of rejoining the luminous void!
Or is it a mirage? Dare I stretch out my hand? . . .
Oh God! The hand I draw back is cold and dead.

It gleams like a rose of frost,
For having just for a moment, near that door,
Brushed the pale air and that unreal day! . . .
What is it that sways over me, something
Adrift, the shadow of a wing,
Invisible above me, like an azure veil?
Has something from the other land entered
My soul? My eyes close, I stumble,
I am tired, broken and I breathe in the drowsiness
Of those dying roses, weary with sun,
Whose fragrance but faintly rises toward me.
How faraway is the very earth! . . .
Where has it gone, the blue dance of the butteries,
Two of them, just now, on the threshold at play?
Not a cloud in the sky that does not disappear
In the serene clearness, the second it drifts past.
My heart grows calm as well; all grows calm.
I draw close. I approach the Unknown that lures
And entwines me with caresses, with chains
Of owers . . . That word which I feared to say,
I have said. It sings out. Listen. Did you
Hear it clearly? Then gently take my hand.
....................................
Comme elles se ressemblent ces deux routes dor!

Peut-tre est-ce une seule et la mme, mais vue
Des conns du sommeil et de ceux de la vie.
Que je voudrais de l mapercevoir debout,
Ple et lasse, accoude cette porte, sous
Ces eurs dont les parfums enveloppent mes songes.
Que les choses ici doivent sembler tranges,
Sans trve et sans repos, et dans quelle rumeur
De feuillages, de vents et de vagues! Lhorreur
De vivre est si profonde, l; si souriante
La joie dtre rentr dans le nant divin!
Ou nest-ce quun mirage? tendrais-je la main? . . .
O Dieu! Ma main que jen retire est froide et morte,
Elle scintille comme une rose de gel,
Rien que davoir, un seul instant, sous cette porte,
Efeur cet air ple et ce jour irrel! . . .
Quest-ce donc qui stend, comme lombre dune aile
Invisible sur moi, comme un voile azur?
Quelque chose de lautre monde est-il entr
Dans mon me? Mes yeux se ferment, je chancelle.
Je suis si lasse et si brise, et jai sommeil

De ces mourantes roses lasses de soleil,
Dont les parfums vers moi ne montent plus qu peine.
Comme toute la terre elle-mme est lointaine! . . .
O donc sen sont alls ces deux papillons bleus
Qui, tout lheure, sur ce seuil, jouaient tous deux?
Il nest pas un nuage au ciel qui ne sefface
Dans la srnit divine ds quil passe.
Mon coeur sapaise aussi, tout sapaise. Je viens.
Je mapproche et je viens, Inconnu, qui mattires
Et menlaces avec ces caresses, ces liens
De eurs . . . Cette parole que je nosais dire,
Je lai dite. Elle chante. coute. Las-tu bien
Entendue? Alors, prends-moi doucement la main.
..........................................
O God, who could be there . . .
O God, who could be there

In the absence beyond
This door?
Who has risen before
Me, from dead dust
And the void?
Oh, speak fast!

Dont stare at me like that,
In silence! I am afraid;
Dont stare at me with such eager eyes,
My somber sister!
Are you my soul?

Are you my shade?
Whoever you are,
Go away, ghost!
I dont want to see you anymore . . .
Oh, my very own angels, help me!
Through the happiness of twilight . . .
Through the happiness of twilight,

Who is it who sighs, what is the lament?
Who has come to rest against my heart,
Like a wounded bird?
Is it a plaint of the earth?

Is it a future voice,
A voice from the past?
To the point of anguish, I hear
That sound in the silence.
Island of forgetfulness, o Paradise!

What cry rends tonight,
Your voice that cradles me?
What cry pierces
Your bright circlet of owers,
And tears your lovely veil of mirth?
O Dieu qui donc est l . . .
O Dieu qui donc est l,

Dans le vide, au del
De cette porte?
Qui sest lev, devant
Moi, de la poussire morte
Et du nant?
O parle vite!
Ne me regarde pas de la sorte,
En silence! Jai peur;
Ne xe pas ainsi sur moi tes yeux avides,
Ma sombre soeur!
Es-tu mon me,

Es-tu mon ombre?
Qui que tu sois,
Va-ten, fantme!
Je ne veux plus te voir . . .
O mes anges, moi!
Ce soir, travers le bonheur . . .
Ce soir, travers le bonheur,

Qui donc soupire, quest-ce qui pleure?
Quest-ce qui vient palpiter sur mon coeur,
Comme un oiseau bless?
Est-ce une plainte de la terre,

Est-ce une voix future,
Une voix du pass?
Jcoute, jusqu la souffrance,
Ce son dans le silence.
Ile doubli, Paradis!

Quel cri dchire, cette nuit,
Ta voix qui me berce?
Quel cri traverse
Ta ceinture de eurs,
Et ton beau voile dallgresse?
Along the pale waters, in these valleys . . .
Along the pale waters, in these valleys,

Silvered with moonlight and willows,
In the blue twilight, two by two,
A hand on a shoulder,
Or alone,
Slow shadows trail past:
They are the souls.
Strangers to the earth, they come,

By which paths of deep night
And which heaths of asphodels?
Toward this star of Eden,
For them
The other world.
Vainly, I beseech, while offering my arms:

Are you happy?
Not one of them answers.
They do not understand.
They pass silently,
Wreathed in a pale smile;
And from the heart of happiness, they sigh.
Neither the roses and their aromas

Nor these beautiful shores where grow
The ower of the hyacinth and the ower of balm
Have dispelled the vague fear
And the bitterness of these souls;
They suffered long ago.
They are the Shadows and their shadows delight them . . .

Be gentle to them, O Light, touch them gently,
Suavity divine, Chalice, where the sky rests,
Which they approach only in trembling,
And with closed eyelids.
Au long des eaux ples, dans ces valles . . .
Au long des eaux ples, dans ces valles

De lune et de saules argentes,
Au bleu crpuscule, deux deux,
Une main sur lpaule,
Ou seules,
De lentes Ombres se promnent:
Ce sont les Ames.
trangres la terre, elles viennent,

Par quelles voies de nuit profonde
Et quelles landes dasphodles?
Vers cette toile de lEden,
O cest pour elles
Lautre monde.
En vain je demande en leur tendant les bras:

Etes-vous heureuses?
Pas une delles qui rponde.
Elles ne comprennent pas.
Elles passent silencieuses,
En un ple sourire;
Au sein du bonheur elles soupirent.
Ni les roses et leurs aromes,

Ni ces beaux rivages o crot
La eur de lhyacinthe et la eur du dictame,
Nont dissip le vague effroi
Et lamertume de ces mes;
Elles ont souffert autre fois.
Ce sont des Ombres; et lombre les enchante . . .

Sois-leur douce, Lumire, touche-les doucement
Suavit divine, Coupe o le ciel repose,
Dont elles napprochent quen tremblant,
Et les paupires closes.
I say, teach me who you are, Azrael . . .
I say, teach me who you are, Azrael,

And the dark angel rose in the sky,
Stretching his wide wings over me.
The earth shuddered beneath an unknown breath,

The chalices of trembling owers closed,
And the world was suddenly blotted from my sight.
Yet, there were still things,

As I heard the weightless crowd
Of dark hours passing by.
And, as if inside me, roses were growing.
In the distance, spheres sang,
Stars were living.
When there was something like a dawn,

And I saw once again Azraels great wings,
Which closed and descended from the sky
With all the immense night in them,
He smiled as his eeting shadow,

Like a bird, pursued its customary song,
Or an enchanted wave, immobile on the shore,
Suddenly beat like a wild swan.
And I saw a sunbeam, arrested on my hand,
Tremble and gently resume its course.
O death, dust of stars . . .
O death, dust of stars,

Rise beneath my steps.
Like a ame, maddened with wind,

Come, somber breath, where I waver.
Come, o sweet wave that shines

In the darkness,
Sweep me along inside your silent emptiness.
Apprends-moi, dis-je, qui tu es, Azral . . .
Apprends-moi, dis-je, qui tu es, Azral.

Et lange sombre sleva dans le ciel,
En tendant sur moi ses grandes ailes.
La terre frissonna sous un soufe inconnu,

Les corolles des eurs tremblantes se fermrent,
Et le monde soudain seffaca de mes yeux.
Pourtant des choses taient encore:

Jentendais la foule lgre
Des heures obscures qui passaient,
Et, comme en moi, des roses qui croissaient.
Au loin chantaient des sphres,
Des toiles vivaient.
Quand il se t comme une aurore;

Etje revis les grandes ailes dAzral,
Qui se fermaient et descendaient du ciel,
Avec limmense nuit en elles.
Il souriait son ombre phmre.

Un oiseau poursuivait sa chanson coutumire.
Une vague enchante, immobile au rivage,
Tout coup sabattit, comme un cygne sauvage.
Et je vis un rayon arrt sur ma main,
Frmir, et doucement reprendre son chemin.
O mort, poussire dtoiles . . .
O mort, poussire dtoiles,

Lve-toi sous mes pas!
Viens, soufe sombre o je vacille,

Comme une amme ivre de vent!
Viens, douce vague qui brilles

Dans les tnbres;
Emporte-moi dans ton nant!
It is in you that I wish to lie down,

To extinguish and vanish,
Death, longed for by my soul,
Strong God, whom she awaits
With songs and joyous sounds of love.
Come and break me like a ower of foam

A ower of sunlight riding the crest
Of the waves,
Stripped by the night, blotted by the shadows,
Blossomed by space.
And, as if from a golden amphora,

A wine of ame and divine aroma,
Pour out my soul
Into your abyss, so it may embalm
The somber earth, the breath of the dead.
Cest en toi que je veux mtendre,

Mteindre et me dissoudre,
Mort, o mon me aspire!
Dieu fort quelle attend
Avec des chants et des rires damour.
Viens, brise-moi comme une eur dcume,

Une eur de soleil la cime
Des eaux,
Que la nuit effeuille, que lombre efface,
Et que lespace panouit.
Et comme dune amphore dor

Un vin de amme et darome divin,
panche mon me
En ton abme, pour quelle embaume
La terre sombre et le soufe des morts.
BELGIAN FRANCOPHONE LIBRARY
Edited by Donald Flanell Friedman
As Belgium has become a center and focal point of the resurgent new
Europe, the Belgian Francophone Library was founded at Peter Lang
Publishing, New York, as a special series devoted to the rich and varied
literature and cultural life of the French-speaking community in Belgium.
The series will publish English translations of important works of Belgian
Literature, as well as critical studies, principally in French and English, of
Belgian literature, culture, and social history. It is the hope of series editor,
Donald Flanell Friedman of Winthrop University, and the initial
contributors to the series to broaden knowledge of the specificity,
fascination, and enduring artistic contribution of this crossroads country.
For additional information about this series or for the submission of

manuscripts, please contact:
Peter Lang Publishing

Acquisitions Department
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An Anthology of

Belgian Symbolist Poets

Donald Flanell Friedman

Donald Flanell Friedman

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

Donald Flanell Friedman

DIE DEUTSCHE BIBLIOTHEK-CIP-EINHEITSAUFNAHME

2003 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

It is with pleasure that I again offer this selection of Belgian Symbolist

The encouragement of my mother and father, their sensitivity to all manifesta-

Belgian Symbolism: A Poetry of Place and Displacement 1

The indolent mists of autumn . . . 8

At evening, they appear . . . 24

They killed three sweet little girls 102

Gaze into our depths . . . 218

Be absolved by my decree . . . 232

cover: Fernand Khnopff. A Gesture of Offering, 1900, drypoint,

Fernand Khnopff. An Abandoned City. 1904. Royal Museum, Brussels.

Belgian Symbolism participates in the essence of the international move-

repertoires of places, objects, and Flemish or Walloon experiences, by entering

1. Victor Remouchamps. Le Monde Intrieur in Le Reveil. (Janvier, 1894), p.25.

A pivotal gure in Belgian letters, Georges Rodenbach was among the

The Poetry of Georges Rodenbach:

Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Genve: Slatkine Reprints, 1978).

The indolent mist of autumn . . .

The indolent mist of autumn at last dispersed . . .

It comes unfolded, then folds back on itself, like a wing,

All is a shade of grey, cloaked in the color of fog:

The victorious mist, against the pale depth of air,

Deceased are the patrician mansions . . .

Deceased are the patrician mansions,

Le brouillard indolet de lautomne . . .

Le brouillard indolent de lautomne est pars . . .

Il se dplie et se replie. Et cest une aile

Tout est gris, tout revt la couleur de la brume:

Brouillard vainqueur qui, sur le fond ple de lair,

Trs dfuntes sont les maisons . . .

Trs dfuntes sont les maisons patriciennes

The ancient church hovers . . .

The ancient church hovers in a dream of vast silence,

A twilight of half-mourning pervades all of the naves;

Ah! to inhale that sickly smell of ancient church,

Golden wine evaporated from the agon; waxen

And the ever present and enduring human smell

Odor of death, as well, for everything is dying!

Yes, everything is dead and dies ceaselessly here:

La vieille glise rve . . .

La vieille glise rve en un vaste silence;

Il rgne dans les nefs un jour de demi-deuil;

Tout est g, tout sappauvrit; les hauts piliers

Ah! cette maladive odeur de vieille glise,

Vin dor vapor des burettes, bougies

Et vous aussi, votre immortelle odeur humaine,

Odeur de mort aussi, car tout ici se meurt!

My city, beloved sister . . .

My city, beloved sister, whom I resemble,

The chamber, sad and weary . . .

The chamber, sad and weary, has at last grown resigned,

The evening grows old, frightened of the lights,

O ville, toi ma soeur . . .

O ville, toi ma soeur qui je suis pareil,

La chambre triste et lasse . . .