Innocent Paradise:
Woman at the Window,
by Caspar David Friedrich, 1822 (Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).
BPK, Berlin, Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais / Jörg P. Anders.
Moesta and errabunda
Tell me, does your heart sometimes fly away, Agathe,
Far from the black ocean of the foul city,
Towards another ocean where splendor bursts,
Blue, clear, deep, as well as virginity?
Tell me, does your heart sometimes fly, Agathe?
The sea, the vast sea, consoles our labors!
What demon has endowed the sea, hoarse singer
That the immense organ accompanies with rumbling winds,
Of this sublime lullaby function?
The sea, the vast sea, consoles our labors!
Take me, wagon!
kidnap me, frigate!
Far !
far !
here the mud is made of our tears!
- Is it true that sometimes Agathe's sad heart
Say: Far from remorse, crimes, pain,
Take me, wagon, take me, frigate?
How far away you are, fragrant paradise,
Where under a clear blue all is love and joy,
Where all that we love is worthy of being loved,
Where in pure pleasure the heart drowns!
How far away you are, fragrant paradise!
But the green paradise of childish loves,
The races, the songs, the kisses, the bouquets,
Violins vibrating behind the hills,
With the jugs of wine, in the evening, in the groves,
- But the green paradise of childish loves,
The innocent paradise, full of furtive pleasures,
Is it already further than India and China?
Can we call him back with plaintive cries,
And still animate it with an Argentinian voice,
The innocent paradise full of stealthy pleasures?
Le tourbillon de la nuit:
The Starry Night,
Saint-Rémy, June 1889, by Vincent Van Gogh (New York, The Museum of Modern Art).
akg-images.
Evening harmony
Here come the times when vibrating on its rod
Each flower evaporates like a censer;
Sounds and scents revolve in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
Each flower evaporates like a censer;
The violin quivers like a grieving heart;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
The sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar.
The violin quivers like a grieving heart,
A tender heart, which hates the vast and black nothingness!
The sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar;
The sun has drowned in its freezing blood.
A tender heart, which hates vast and black nothingness,
From the luminous past collects all vestige!
The sun has drowned in his blood which freezes… ..
Your memory in me shines like a monstrance!
Deceptive Sun:
Lady in Yellow,
by Max Kurzweil, 1899 (Vienna, Wien Museum).
CC BY 4.0, Foto: Birgit und Peter Kainz, Wien Museum.
The beauty
I am beautiful, oh mortals!
like a dream of stone,
And my breast, where each one is bruised in turn,
Is made to inspire love in the poet
Eternal and silent as well as matter.
I am enthroned in the azure like a misunderstood sphinx;
I unite a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans;
I hate the movement that moves the lines,
And I never cry and I never laugh.
The poets, in front of my great attitudes,
That I seem to borrow from the proudest monuments,
Will consume their days in austere studies;
Because I have, to fascinate these docile lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my wide eyes with eternal clarity!
Crazy Evening:
Detail of
Evening on Karl-Johan Avenue,
by Edvard Munch, 1892 (Oslo, Munch-museet).
NPL-DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images.
Spleen
When the low and heavy sky weighs like a cover
On the moaning mind in the grip of long troubles,
And that of the horizon embracing the whole circle
It gives us a dark day sadder than the nights;
When the earth is turned into a damp dungeon,
Where Hope, like a bat,
Goes away beating the walls of her timid wing
And banging his head against rotten ceilings;
When the rain spreading its immense trails
From a vast prison imitates bars,
And that a dumb people of infamous spiders
Comes to stretch its nets deep in our brains,
Suddenly bells are jumping with fury
And send a terrible howl to the sky,
As well as wandering and homeless spirits
Who start to moan obstinately.
- And long hearses, without drums or music,
Slowly scroll through my soul;
Hope,
Defeated, weep, and the Atrocious Anguish, despotic,
On my tilted skull plants its black flag.
Fugitive Beauty:
Woman with Hat and Feather Boa,
by Gustav Klimt, 1909 (Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere).
akg-images / Erich Lessing
To a passerby
The noisy street was sceaming around me.
Long, thin, in great mourning, majestic pain,
A woman passed, with a lavish hand
Lifting, swinging the scallop and hem;
Agile and noble, with his statue leg.
Me, I drank, tense like an extravagant,
In his eye, a livid sky where the hurricane germinates,
The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.
Lightning ... then night!
- Fugitive beauty
Whose gaze suddenly made me reborn,
Will I only see you in eternity?
Elsewhere, very far from here !
too late !
never
maybe!
Cause I don't know where you're running, you don't know where I'm going
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
Ambrosia plant
:
Les Buveurs,
by Vincent Van Gogh after Honoré Daumier, 1890 (Chicago, Art Institute).
The Art Institute of Chicago / Joseph Winterbotham Collection
The soul of wine
One evening, the soul of wine sang in the bottles:
"Man, towards you I push, oh dear disinherited,
Under my glass prison and my ruddy waxes,
A song full of light and brotherhood!
I know how much it takes, on the burning hill,
Of pain, sweat and scorching sun
To generate my life and to give me the soul;
But I will not be ungrateful or evil,
Because I feel immense joy when I fall
In the throat of a man worn out by his labors,
And her warm breast is a sweet grave
Where I like myself much better than in my cold cellars.
Do you hear the chorus of Sundays ringing out
And the hope that chirps in my throbbing breast?
Elbows on the table and rolling up your sleeves,
You will glorify me and you will be happy;
I will light up the eyes of your delighted wife;
To your son I will give back his strength and his colors
And will be for this frail athlete of life
The oil that firms the muscles of wrestlers.
In you I will fall, ambrosia plant,
Precious grain thrown by the eternal Sower,
So that from our love is born poetry
Which will spring to God like a rare fl ower!
"