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The Muse
Poet, take up your lute and give me a kiss;
The eglantine flower feels its buds open,
The spring is born tonight; the winds will catch fire;
And the wagtail, awaiting the dawn,
Begins to alight on the first green bushes.
Poet, take up your lute, and give me a kiss.
The Poet
How dark it is in the valley!
I thought a veiled form
Was floating out there over the forest.
It came out of the meadow;
Its foot skimmed the flowered grass;
It is a strange reverie;
It fades and disappears.
The Muse
Poet, take up your lute; the night, on the lawn,
Balances the zephyr in its fragrant veil.
The rose, still a virgin, closes jealously
Over the pearly hornet she intoxicates in dying.
Listen! all is silent; think of your beloved.
Tonight, beneath the lindens, on the dark branches
The setting sun’s ray leaves a gentler farewell.
Tonight, all will bloom: immortal nature
Fills with perfumes, love and murmuring,
Like the joyful bed of two young spouses.
The Poet
Why does my heart beat so fast?
What is it in me that stirs
And makes me feel terrified?
Is someone not knocking at my door?
Why does my half-dead lamp
Dazzle me with its light?
Almighty God! my whole body shudders.
Who is coming? who calls me? — No one.
I am alone; it is the hour striking;
O solitude! O poverty!
The Muse
Poet, take up your lute; the wine of youth
Ferments tonight in the veins of God.
My breast is restless; pleasure oppresses it,
And the thirsty winds have set my lips on fire.
O lazy child! look, I am beautiful.
Our first kiss, do you not remember it,
When I saw you so pale at the touch of my wing,
And when, your eyes in tears, you fell into my arms?
Ah! I consoled you for a bitter sorrow!
Alas! still so young, you were dying of love.
Console me tonight, I am dying of hope;
I need to pray to live until daybreak.
The Poet
Is it you whose voice calls me,
O my poor Muse! is it you?
O my flower! O my immortal one!
Sole chaste and faithful being
In whom love for me still lives!
Yes, there you are, it is you, my fair one,
It is you, my mistress and my sister!
And I feel, in the deep night,
From your golden robe that floods me,
The rays slip into my heart.
The Muse
Poet, take up your lute; it is I, your immortal one,
Who saw you tonight sad and silent,
And who, like a bird called by its brood,
Descends from the heavens to weep with you.
Come, you suffer, friend. Some solitary sorrow
Gnaws at you, something has moaned in your heart;
Some love has come to you, like those seen on earth,
A shadow of pleasure, a semblance of happiness.
Come, let us sing before God; sing in your thoughts,
In your lost pleasures, in your past sorrows;
Let us depart, in a kiss, for an unknown world,
Awaken at random the echoes of your life,
Let us speak of happiness, glory and folly,
And let it be a dream, and the first to come.
Let us invent somewhere places where one forgets;
Let us depart, we are alone, the universe is ours.
Here is green Scotland and dark Italy,
And Greece, my mother, where honey is so sweet,
Argos, and Pteleon, city of hecatombs,
And divine Messa, pleasing to doves,
And the changing, wooded brow of Pelion;
And the blue Titaresius, and the silver gulf
That shows in its waters, where the swan gazes,
White Oloosson and white Camyre.
Tell me, what golden dream will our songs lull?
Where will the tears we are about to shed come from?
This morning, when day struck your eyelid,
What pensive seraph, bent over your bedside,
Shook lilacs from his light robe,
And whispered to you the loves he dreamed of?
Shall we sing hope, sadness or joy?
Shall we bathe battalions of steel in blood?
Shall we suspend the lover on the silken ladder?
Shall we throw the horse’s foam to the wind?
Shall we tell what hand, in the countless lamps
Of the celestial house, lights night and day
The holy oil of life and eternal love?
Shall we cry to Tarquin: “It is time, here is the shadow!”
Shall we descend to gather the pearl at the bottom of the seas?
Shall we lead the goat to the bitter ebony trees?
Shall we show the sky to Melancholy?
Shall we follow the hunter on the steep mountains?
The doe looks at him; she weeps and pleads;
Her heath awaits him; her fawns are newborn;
He bends down, he cuts her throat, he throws to the pack
His still-living heart on the sweating dogs.
Shall we paint a maiden with crimson cheek,
Going to mass, a page following her,
And with a distracted glance, beside her mother,
Forgetting her prayer on her half-open lips?
She listens trembling, in the echo of the pillar,
To the ringing spur of a bold cavalier.
Shall we tell the heroes of old France
To climb fully armed to the battlements of their towers,
And to resurrect the naive romance
That their forgotten glory taught the troubadours?
Shall we dress a soft elegy in white?
The man of Waterloo will tell us his life,
And what he mowed from the herd of humans
Before the envoy of eternal night
Came on his green mound to strike him down with a wing,
And on his iron heart crossed his two hands?
Shall we nail to the post of a haughty satire
The seven-times-sold name of a pale pamphleteer,
Who, driven by hunger, from the depths of his oblivion,
Comes, shivering with envy and impotence,
To insult hope on the brow of genius,
And to bite the laurel his breath has soiled?
Take up your lute! take up your lute! I can no longer be silent;
My wing lifts me on the breath of spring.
The wind will carry me away; I am going to leave the earth.
A tear from you! God listens to me; it is time.
The Poet
If you need, my dear sister,
Only a kiss from a friendly lip
And only a tear from my eyes,
I will give them to you without pain;
Let our loves be remembered by you,
If you go back up to the heavens.
I sing neither hope,
Nor glory, nor happiness,
Alas! not even suffering.
The mouth keeps silence
To listen to the heart speak.
The Muse
Do you think then that I am like the autumn wind,
That feeds on tears even on a tomb,
And for whom sorrow is but a drop of water?
O poet! a kiss, it is I who give it to you.
The grass I wanted to pull from this place,
It is your idleness; your sorrow belongs to God.
Whatever care your youth endures,
Let it widen, this holy wound
That the black seraphim made in the depths of your heart:
Nothing makes us so great as a great sorrow.
But, to be touched by it, do not believe, O poet,
That your voice here below must remain mute.
The most desperate songs are the most beautiful,
And I know immortal ones that are pure sobs.
When the pelican, weary of a long voyage,
In the evening mists returns to its reeds,
Its famished little ones run along the shore
Seeing it from afar swoop down on the waters.
Already, believing they will seize and share their prey,
They run to their father with cries of joy
Shaking their beaks on their hideous gullets.
He, gaining with slow steps a high rock,
With his drooping wing sheltering his brood,
A melancholy fisher, looks at the heavens.
The blood flows in long streams from his open breast;
In vain he has dredged the depth of the seas;
The Ocean was empty and the shore deserted;
For all food he brings his heart.
Dark and silent, stretched on the stone,
Sharing with his sons his father’s entrails,
In his sublime love he cradles his sorrow, And, watching his bloody breast flow,
On his feast of death he sinks and staggers,
Drunk with pleasure, tenderness and horror.
But sometimes, in the midst of the divine sacrifice,
Weary of dying in too long a torment,
He fears his children may leave him alive;
Then he rises, opens his wing to the wind,
And, striking his heart with a savage cry,
He sends into the night so funereal a farewell,
That the birds of the sea desert the shore,
And that the traveler delayed on the beach,
Feeling death pass by, commends himself to God.
Poet, this is how great poets act.
They let those who live a while make merry;
But the human feasts they serve at their celebrations
Mostly resemble those of pelicans.
When they speak thus of deceived hopes,
Of sadness and oblivion, of love and misfortune,
It is not a concert to dilate the heart.
Their declamations are like swords:
They trace in the air a dazzling circle,
But a drop of blood always hangs from it.
The Poet
O Muse! insatiable specter,
Do not ask so much of me.
Man writes nothing on the sand
At the hour when the north wind passes.
I have seen the time when my youth
On my lips was constantly
Ready to sing like a bird;
But I have suffered a hard martyrdom,
And the least of it that I could say,
If I tried it on my lyre,
Would break it like a reed.
Alfred De Musset
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-night-of-may-alfred-de-musset/