At the Violent Lightning Flash of Your Divine Face

Poem by Théodore Agrippa D'Aubigné Period 16th century

At the violent lightning flash of your divine face,
Being but a mortal man, your celestial beauty
Made me taste death, death and ruin
Only to come anew to immortality.

Your divine fire burned my mortal essence,
Your celestial fire seized me and rapt me to the Heavens,
Your soul was divine and mine became such:
Goddess, you set me in the rank of the other gods.

My mouth dared to touch the crimson mouth
To gather, without death, the immortal beauty,
I have lived on nectar, I have sucked ambrosia,
Savoring the sweetest of divinity.

In the eyes of the jealous Gods, filled with frenzy,
I have smoking altars like the other gods,
And for me, secret God, jealousy blushed
When my unknown star disguised the Heavens.

Even a counterfeit God, refused by the mouth,
Avenges with hammer blows his impotent wrath,
While I have gathered the kiss and the bed
And the fifth fruit of the sweetest nectar.

These blinded humans, envious, wage war on me,
Raising against heaven the ladder, they have climbed,
But from my paradise I scorn their earth
And heaven is nothing to me beside your beauty.

Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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