Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Or see the index
An Goethe
Das Unvergängliche
Ist nur dein Gleichnis!
Gott der Verfängliche
Ist Dichter-Erschleichnis…
Welt-Rad, das rollende,
Streift Ziel auf Ziel:
Not – nennt′ s der Grollende,
Der Narr nennt′ s – Spiel…
Welt-Spiel, das herrische,
Mischt Sein und Schein: –
Das Ewig-Närrische
Mischt uns – hinein!…
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 – 1900)
An Goethe
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive M-N, Archive M-N, Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Nietzsche
The author’s address to
The Town Council of Edinburgh
Your poet humbly means and shaws.
That, contrair to just rights and laws,
I’ve suffer’d muckle wrang.
By Lucky Raid * and ballad-singers,
Wha thumb’d with their coarse dirty fingers
Sweet Adie’s funeral sang.
They spoil’d my sense, and staw my cash.
My muse’s pride murgully’d ;
And printing it like their vile trash.
The honest lieges whilly’d.
Allan Ramsay
(1684-1758)
The author’s address to The Town Council of Edinburgh
* A printer’s relict, who, with the hawkers, reprinted my pastoral on Mr. Addison, without my knowledge, on ugly paper, full of errors.
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: # Classic Poetry Archive, Archive Q-R, Archive Q-R
Orphée
. . . Je compose en esprit, sous les myrtes, Orphée
L’Admirable ! . . . le feu, des cirques purs descend ;
Il change le mont chauve en auguste trophée
D’où s’exhale d’un dieu l’acte retentissant.
Si le dieu chante, il rompt le site tout-puissant ;
Le soleil voit l’horreur du mouvement des pierres ;
Une plainte inouïe appelle éblouissants
Les hauts murs d’or harmonieux d’un sanctuaire.
Il chante, assis au bord du ciel splendide, Orphée !
Le roc marche, et trébuche; et chaque pierre fée
Se sent un poids nouveau qui vers l’azur délire !
D’un Temple à demi nu le soir baigne l’essor,
Et soi-même il s’assemble et s’ordonne dans l’or
À l’âme immense du grand hymne sur la lyre !
Paul Valéry
(1871-1945)
Orphée
Poème
Album de vers anciens
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive U-V, Archive U-V, Valéry, Paul
As If a Phantom Caress’d Me
As if a phantom caress’d me,
I thought I was not alone walking
here by the shore;
But the one I thought was with me as
now I walk by the shore,
the one I loved that caress’d me,
As I lean and look
through the glimmering light,
that one has utterly disappear’d.
And those appear that are hateful to me
and mock me.
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Poem: As If a Phantom Caress’d Me
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive W-X, Archive W-X, Whitman, Walt
The Star
Last night
I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea,
Till my ego expanding encompassed sea and star,
Containing both as in a trembling cup.
Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)
The Star
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive Q-R, Archive Q-R, Ridge, Lola
The Song Of Iron
I
Not yet hast Thou sounded
Thy clangorous music,
Whose strings are under the mountains…
Not yet hast Thou spoken
The blooded, implacable Word…
But I hear in the Iron singing –
In the triumphant roaring of the steam and pistons pounding –
Thy barbaric exhortation…
And the blood leaps in my arteries, unreproved,
Answering Thy call…
All my spirit is inundated with the tumultuous passion of Thy Voice,
And sings exultant with the Iron,
For now I know I too am of Thy Chosen…
Oh fashioned in fire –
Needing flame for Thy ultimate word –
Behold me, a cupola
Poured to Thy use!
Heed not my tremulous body
That faints in the grip of Thy gauntlet.
Break it… and cast it aside…
But make of my spirit
That dares and endures
Thy crucible…
Pour through my soul
Thy molten, world-whelming song.
… Here at Thy uttermost gate
Like a new Mary, I wait…
II
Charge the blast furnace, workman…
Open the valves –
Drive the fires high…
(Night is above the gates).
How golden-hot the ore is
From the cupola spurting,
Tossing the flaming petals
Over the silt and furnace ash –
Blown leaves, devastating,
Falling about the world…
Out of the furnace mouth –
Out of the giant mouth –
The raging, turgid, mouth –
Fall fiery blossoms
Gold with the gold of buttercups
In a field at sunset,
Or huskier gold of dandelions,
Warmed in sun-leavings,
Or changing to the paler hue
At the creamy hearts of primroses.
Charge the converter, workman –
Tired from the long night?
But the earth shall suck up darkness –
The earth that holds so much…
And out of these molten flowers,
Shall shape the heavy fruit…
Then open the valves –
Drive the fires high,
Your blossoms nurturing.
(Day is at the gates
And a young wind…)
Put by your rod, comrade,
And look with me, shading your eyes…
Do you not see –
Through the lucent haze
Out of the converter rising –
In the spirals of fire
Smiting and blinding,
A shadowy shape
White as a flame of sacrifice,
Like a lily swaying?
III
The ore leaping in the crucibles,
The ore communicant,
Sending faint thrills along the leads…
Fire is running along the roots of the mountains…
I feel the long recoil of earth
As under a mighty quickening…
(Dawn is aglow in the light of the Iron…)
All palpitant, I wait…
IV
Here ye, Dictators – late Lords of the Iron,
Shut in your council rooms, palsied, depowered –
The blooded, implacable Word?
Not whispered in cloture, one to the other,
(Brother in fear of the fear of his brother…)
But chanted and thundered
On the brazen, articulate tongues of the Iron
Babbling in flame…
Sung to the rhythm of prisons dismantled,
Manacles riven and ramparts defaced…
(Hearts death-anointed yet hearing life calling…)
Ankle chains bursting and gallows unbraced…
Sung to the rhythm of arsenals burning…
Clangor of iron smashing on iron,
Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying
Of mail-sided monsters shattered asunder…
Hulks of black turbines all mangled and roaring,
Battering egress through ramparted walls…
Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power,
Into the holocaust snorting and plunging…
Mighty converters torn from their axis,
Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
Jumbled in white-heaten masses disshapen…
Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron…
Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying…
Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending…
Shock of leviathans prone on each other…
Scaled flanks touching, ore entering ore…
Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying
In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron,
Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
Mad with a moment’s exuberant living!
Crash of devastating hammers despoiling..
Hands inexorable, marring
What hands had so cunningly moulded…
Structures of steel welded, subtily tempered,
Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
Chords never final but onward progressing
In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound
in mad vortices whirling…
Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling…
The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming…
The blare of the rude molten music of Iron…
Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)
The Song Of Iron
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive Q-R, Archive Q-R, Ridge, Lola
Das Fräulein stand am Meere
Das Fräulein stand am Meere
Und seufzte lang und bang,
Es rührte sie so sehre
Der Sonnenuntergang.
Mein Fräulein! sein Sie munter,
Das ist ein altes Stück;
Hier vorne geht sie unter
Und kehrt von hinten zurück.
Autor: Heinrich Heine
Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856)
Das Fräulein stand am Meere
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive G-H, Archive G-H, Heine, Heinrich
By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame
By the bivouac’s fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow–but first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields’ and woods’ dim outline,
The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
By the bivouac’s fitful flame.
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Poem: By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive W-X, Archive W-X, Whitman, Walt
To The Others
I see you, refulgent ones,
Burning so steadily
Like big white arc lights…
There are so many of you.
I like to watch you weaving –
Altogether and with precision
Each his ray –
Your tracery of light,
Making a shining way about America.
I note your infinite reactions –
In glassware
And sequin
And puddles
And bits of jet –
And here and there a diamond…
But you do not yet see me,
Who am a torch blown along the wind,
Flickering to a spark
But never out.
Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)
To The Others
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive Q-R, Archive Q-R, Ridge, Lola
My Land
A new land, like a stainless flower set
In the green foliage of the waving sea;
Or like a maiden whose fair heart is free,
Whose honest eyes with no sad tears are wet,
Whose bosom has no passion to forget,
But thrills and lifts exuberant, as she
Voices some sudden-flooding melody!
A land of strength, life, vigour, youth — and yet
An old land, grey as I, her child, am grey;
Filled with the whispers of old thoughts that stir
And wake, like shadows of the past that play
Deep in the beauty of a child’s grave eyes,
And show beneath life’s gladness glancing there
The pathos of a hundred histories.
Arthur Adams
(1872-1936)
My Land
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Adams, Arthur, Archive A-B, Archive A-B
Sorrows of Werther
WERTHER had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And for all the wealth of Indies
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sigh’d and pin’d and ogled,
And his passion boil’d and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by it troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811–63)
Sorrows of Werther
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: # Classic Poetry Archive, -Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Archive S-T, Archive S-T
Day And Night
In Warsaw in Poland
Half the world away,
The one I love best of all
Thought of me to-day;
I know, for I went
Winged as a bird,
In the wide flowing wind
His own voice I heard;
His arms were round me
In a ferny place,
I looked in the pool
And there was his face
But now it is night
And the cold stars say:
“Warsaw in Poland
Is half the world away.”
Sara Teasdale
(1884-1933)
Day And Night
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Archive S-T, Teasdale, Sara
Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature