Allegory, Poem by Paul Verlaine

Poem by Paul Verlaine Collection Jadis et naguèreThemes SummerPeriod 19th century

Despotic, ponderous, colorless, Summer,
Like a lazy king presiding over an execution,
Stretches in the white heat of the complicit sky
And yawns. Man sleeps far from the work he quit.

The lark in the morning, weary, has not sung,
Not a cloud, not a breath, nothing that puckers
Or wrinkles this implacably smooth azure
Where silence seethes in immobility.

The harsh torpor has overtaken the cicadas
And on their narrow bed of uneven stones
The half-dried streams no longer leap.

An incessant rotation of luminous
Moires spreads its ebb and flow…
Wasps, here and there, fly, yellow and black.

Paul Verlaine

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