The Starlit Head – The Pretty Redhead

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection CalligrammesThemes WarPeriod 20th century

Here I am before all a man full of sense
Knowing life and of death what a living man can know
Having felt the sorrows and the joys of love
Having known how sometimes to impose his ideas
Knowing several languages
Having traveled quite a bit
Having seen war in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost his best friends in the frightful struggle
I know of old and new as much as a single man could know of both
And without worrying today about this war
Between us and for us my friends
I judge this long quarrel of tradition and invention
Of Order and Adventure

You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s mouth
Mouth that is order itself
Be indulgent when you compare us
To those who were the perfection of order
We who seek adventure everywhere
We are not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange domains
Where mystery in bloom offers itself to whoever wants to gather it
There are new fires there colors never seen
A thousand weightless phantasms
To which reality must be given

We want to explore goodness enormous country where all
is silent
There is also time that one can chase away or bring back
Pity for us who fight always at the frontiers
Of the limitless and of the future
Pity for our errors pity for our sins

Here comes summer the violent season
And my youth is dead as is the spring
O Sun it is the time of burning Reason
And I wait
To follow it always the noble and sweet form
That it takes so that I love it only
It comes and draws me like iron to a magnet
It has the charming aspect
Of an adorable redhead

Her hair is gold one would say
A beautiful lightning that would last
Or those flames that strut
In the tea roses that fade

But laugh laugh at me
Men from everywhere especially people from here
For there are so many things I dare not tell you
So many things you would not let me say
Have pity on me

Guillaume Apollinaire

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-starlit-head-the-pretty-redhead-guillaume-apollinaire/