Ode to the West Wind

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-striken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until 

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destryer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II

Percy Bysshe SHELLEY (1792-1822) Ode to the West  Wind

City Dusk

Come out... out

To this inevitable night of mine

Oh you dinker of new wine,
Here's pageantry... Here's carnival,
Rich dusk, dim streets and all
The whisperings of city night...

I have closed my book of fading harmonies,
( The shadows fell across me in the park)
And my soul was sad with violins and trees,
And I was sick for dark,
When suddenly it hastened by me, bringing
Thousands of lights,a haunting breeze,
And a night of streets and singing...

I shall know you by your eager feet
and by your pale, pale hair;
I'll whisper happy incoherent things
While I'm waiting for you there...

All the faces unforgettable in dusk
Will blend to yours,
And the footsteps like a thousand overtures
Will blend to yours,
And there will be more drunkenness than wine
In the softness of your eyes on mine...

Faint violins where lovely ladies dine,
The brushing of skirts, the voices of the night
And all the lure of friendly eyes... Ah there
We"ll drift like summer sounds upon the summer air...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald  (Thousand-and-First Ship)

Crows

Lord, when the open field is cold,

When in the battered villages

The endless angelus dies-

Above the dark and drooping world

Let the empty skies disclose

Your dear, delightful crows.

Armada dark with harsh cries,

Your nests are tossed by icy winds!

Along the banks of yellowed ponds,

On roads where crumbling crosses rise,

In cold and gray and mournful weather

Scatter, hover, dive together!

In flocks above the fields of France

Where yesterday's dead men lie,

Wheel across the winter sky;

Recall our black inheritance!

Let dutyin your cry be heard,

Mournful, black, uneasy bird.

Yet in that oak, you saints of god,

Swaying in the dying day,

Leave the whstling birds of May

For those who found, within that wood

From which they will not come again,

That every victory is vain.

Arthur Rimbaud (translated by PAUL SCHIMDT)

Le Pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours

Faut-il ou'il m'en souvienne

La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure

Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face

Tandis que sous

Le pont de nos bras passe

Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure

Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante

L'amour s'en va

Comme la vie est lente

Et comme l'Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure

Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours passent les semaines 

Ni temps passé

Ni les amours reviennent

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure

Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Guillaume Apollinaire (Alcools NRF Gallimard)

Obit on Parnassus

Death before forty's no bar. Lo!

These had accomplished their feats:

Chatterton, Burns, and Kit Marlowe,

Byron and Chelley and Keats.

Death, the eventual sensor,

Lays for the forties, and so

Tookoff Jane Austen and Spenser,

Stevenson, Hood, and poor Poe.


You'll leave a better-lined wallet
By reaching the end of your rope
After fifty, like Shakespeare and Smollett,
Thackeray, Dickens, and Pope.


Try for the sixties--but say, boy,
that's when the tombstones were built on
Butler and Sheridan, the play boy
Arnold and Coleridge and Milton.


Three score ant ten--the tides rippling
Over the bar; slip the hawser.
Godspeed to Clemens and Kipling,
Swinburne and Browning and Chaucer.


Some stave the debt off but paid it
At eighty--that's after law.
Wordsworth and Tennyson made it,
And Meredith, Hardy, and Shaw.


But, Death, while you make up your quota,
Please note this confession of candor--
That I wouldn't give an iota
To linger ninety, like Landor.


Francis Scott Fitzgerald  (Thousand-and-First Ship)

SPLEEN

Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle

Sur l'esprit gémissant en proie aux longs ennuis,

Et que de l'horizon embrassant tout le cercle

Il nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits;

Quand la terre est changée en un cachot humide,

Où l'Espérance, comme une chauve-souris,

S'en va battant les murs de son aile timide

Et se cognant la tête à des plafonds pourris;

Quand la pluie étalant ses immenses traînées
D'une vaste prison imite les barreaux,
Et qu'un peuple muet d'infâmes araignées
Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux,
Des cloches tout à coup sautent avec furie
Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement,
Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie
Qui se mettent à geindre opiniâtrement.

-Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique,
Défilent lentement dans mon âme; l'Espoir,
Vaincu, pleure, et l'Angoisse atroce, despotique,
Sur mon crâne incliné plante son drapeau noir.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Anthologie de la poésie française (Larousse)

A Divine Image

Cruelty has a Human Heart.

And Jealousy Human Face;

Terror the Human Form Divine,

And Secrecy the Human Dress.

The Human Dress is forged Iron

The Human Form a fiery Forge,

The Human Face a Furnace seal'd,

The Human Heart its hungry Gorge.

William Blake (Les chants de l'Expérience Arfuyen) 

Minuit Clair

Le soleil et la Méditerranée

Voici ton heure mon âme ton envol libre dans le silence des mots,

Livres fermés, arts désertés, jour aboli, leçon apprise,

Ta force en plénitude émerge, tu te tais, tu admires, tu médites tes thèmes favoris,

La nuit, le sommeil, la mort, les étoiles.

Walt Whitman (Feuilles d'herbe)

Traduction Jacques Darras ( Les cahiers rouges) Grasset

ENDYMION

In ihm ist Jagd noch. Durch seine Geäder

bricht wie durch Gebüsche das Tier.

Täler bilden sich, waldige Bäder

spiegeln die Hindin, und hinter ihr

hurtigt das Blut des geschlossenen Schläfers,

von des traumig wirren Gewäfers

jähem Wiederzergehn gequält.

Aber die Göttin, die, nievermählt,

Jünglingin über den Nächten der Zeiten

hingeht, die sich selber ergänzte

in den Himmeln und keinen betraf,

neigte sich leise zu seinen Seiten,

und von ihren Schultern erglänzte

plötzlich seine Schale aus Schlaf.

Rainer Maria Rilke


Poème à la nuit.  Collection<Der Doppelgänger>  VERDIER

Romance

Collégiale Saint-Mexme vue du Château (37500 Chinon)

Romance

Nobody's serious when they're seventeen.

On a nice night, the hell beer and lemonade

And the café and the noisy atmosphere!

You walk beneath the linden trees on the promenade.

The lindens smell lovely on a night in June!

The air is so sweet that your eyelids close.

The breeze is full of sounds-they come from the tonw-

And the scent of beer, and the vine, and the rose...

Arthur Rimbaud

Translated by Paul Schmidt. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

THE HOUSE OF ERASMUS

At Anderlecht, in this uncertain Autumn

behind the redbrick walls

lie the cluttered books and letters of the Rotterdamer

heard by all Europe

in that rhetorical time

but out here this cold afternoon

in the frost-bitten garden

there's a rose, only a rose of the last days

white, with a silent, distant perfume.

Kenneth White


Mercure de France  Edition Bilingue

Premier Colloque de l'Académie des Goélands

Goéland et ses petits Les 7 îles Côte d'Armor

C'était le mois d'août sur la côte bretonne

il y avait là Whitman ou du moins son fantôme

et avec son Paradis perdu était venu Milton

Valéry était là avec son thème ultime

et Bachelard, avec le rêve anagogique

M. Rimbaud faisait l'accueil, tout en rimes

les mouetttes,naturellement, assuraient la musique.

Kenneth White

Traduit de l'Anglais par Marie-Claude White (MERCURE DE FRANCE)

A Sort of a Song

              

Let the snake wait under 

his weed

and the writing

be of words, slow and quick,sharp

to strike,quiet to wait,

sleepless.

-through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Compose. (No ideas 

but in things) Invent!

Saxifrage is my flower that splits

the rocks.

William Carlos Williams (1944)

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

In my craft or sullen art

In my craft or sullen art

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

when only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms 

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms 

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise o wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Dylan Thomas

Vowels

Vowels

Black A, white E,red I, green U, blue O - vowels,

Some day I will open your silent pregnacies:

A, black belt, hairy with bursting flies,

Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,

Pits of night; E, candor of sand and pavilions,

High glacial spears, white kings, trembling Queen Anne's lace;

I, bloody spittle, laughter dribbling from a face

In wild denial or in anger, vermilions;

U,... divine movement of viridian seas,

Peace of pastures animal-strewn, peace of calm lines

Drawn on foreheads worn with heavy alchemies;

O, supreme Trumpet, harsh with strange stridencies,

Silences traced in angels and astral desings:

O... OMEGA...the violet light of His Eyes!

Arthur Rimbaud

Translated by PAUL SCHMIDT

The Dove

The dove

I had a dove,and the sweet dove died;

And I have thought it died of grieving;

O, what could it grieve for? its feet were tied

With a single thread of my  own hand's weaving;

John Keats  Les Odes

Le bateau ivre

Les mouettes rieuses

Je sais les cieux crevant en éclairs, et les trombes

Et les ressacs et les courants; je sais le soir,

L'Aube exaltée ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes

Et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir!

J'ai vu le soleil bas, taché d'horreurs mystiques,

Illuminant de longs figements violets,

Pareils à des acteurs de drames très-antiques

Les flots roulant au loin leurs frissons de volets!

Rimbaud     Le Bateau ivre (extrait)

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword.

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves
Yet each man does not  die.

Oscar Wilde  The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Odes

Coucher de soleil Almanarre HYERES

Life in death, death in life.

La mort est naissance puisque 
la naissance est une entrée dans la mort. 
 Keats