The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem
Page 25
And he who had great possessions said to the young man who was naked and weeping, ‘I do not wonder that your sorrow is so great, for surely He was a just man.’
And the young man answered, ‘It is not for Him that I am weeping, but for myself. I too have changed water into wine, and I have healed the leper and given sight to the blind. I have walked upon the waters, and from the dwellers in the tombs I have cast out devils. I have fed the hungry in the desert where there was no food, and I have raised the dead from their narrow houses, and at my bidding, and before a great multitude of people, a barren fig-tree withered away. All things that this man has done I have done also. And yet they have not crucified me.’
Oscar Wilde (1894)
from By the Waters of Babylon
Little Poems in Prose
I. The Exodus (August 3, 1492)
1. The Spanish noon is a blaze of azure fire, and the dusty pilgrims crawl like an endless serpent along treeless plains and bleached highroads, through rock-split ravines and castellated, cathedral-shadowed towns.
2. The hoary patriarch, wrinkled as an almond shell, bows painfully upon his staff. The beautiful young mother, ivory-pale, well-nigh swoons beneath her burden; in her large enfolding arms nestles her sleeping babe, round her knees flock her little ones with bruised and bleeding feet. ‘Mother, shall we soon be there’?
3. The youth with Christ-like countenance speaks comfortably to father and brother, to maiden and wife. In his breast, his own heart is broken.
4. The halt, the blind, are amid the train. Sturdy pack-horses laboriously drag the tented wagons wherein lie the sick athirst with fever.
5. The panting mules are urged forward with spur and goad; stuffed are the heavy saddlebags with the wreckage of ruined homes.
6. Hark to the tinkling silver bells that adorn the tenderly-carried silken scrolls.
7. In the fierce noon-glare a lad bears a kindled lamp; behind its network of bronze the airs of heaven breathe not upon its faint purple star.
8. Noble and abject, learned and simple, illustrious and obscure, plod side by side, all brothers now, all merged in one routed army of misfortune.
9. Woe to the straggler who falls by the wayside! no friend shall close his eyes.
10. They leave behind, the grape, the olive, and the fig; the vines they planted, the corn they sowed, the garden-cities of Andalusia and Aragon, Estremadura and La Mancha, of Granada and Castile; the altar, the hearth, and the grave of their fathers.
11. The townsman spits at their garments, the shepherd quits his flock, the peasant his plow, to pelt with curses and stones; the villager sets on their trail his yelping cur.
12. Oh the weary march, oh the uptorn roots of home, oh the blankness of the receding goal!
13. Listen to their lamentation: They that ate dainty food are desolate in the streets; they that were reared in scarlet embrace dunghills. They flee away and wander about. Men say among the nations, they shall no more sojourn there; our end is near, our days are full, our doom is come.
14. Whither shall they turn? for the West hath cast them out, and the East refuseth to receive.
15. O bird of the air, whisper to the despairing exiles, that to-day, to-day, from the many-masted, gayly-bannered port of Palos, sails the world-unveiling Genoese, to unlock the golden gates of sunset and bequeath a Continent to Freedom!
IV. The Test
1. Daylong I brooded upon the Passion of Israel.
2. I saw him bound to the wheel, nailed to the cross, cut off by the sword, burned at the stake, tossed into the seas.
3. And always the patient, resolute, martyr face arose in silent rebuke and defiance.
4. A Prophet with four eyes; wide gazed the orbs of the spirit above the sleeping eyelids of the senses.
5. A Poet, who plucked from his bosom the quivering heart and fashioned it into a lyre.
6. A placid-browed Sage, uplifted from earth in celestial meditation.
7. These I saw, with princes and people in their train; the monumental dead and the standard-bearers of the future.
8. And suddenly I heard a burst of mocking laughter, and turning, I beheld the shuffling gait, the ignominious features, the sordid mask of the son of the Ghetto.
V. Currents
1. Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent.
2. From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe,
3. From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief and Ekaterinoslav,
4. Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion.
5. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward.
6. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.
7. The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem’s royal shepherds renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.
Emma Lazarus (1887)
After the Flood
No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure,
Than a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.
Oh the precious stones that were hiding, – the flowers that were already peeking out.
Stalls were erected in the dirty main street, and boats were towed toward the sea, which rose in layers above as in old engravings.
Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house, – in the slaughterhouses, – in the amphitheaters, where God’s seal turned the windows livid. Blood and milk flowed.
The beavers built. Tumblers of coffee steamed in the public houses.
In the vast, still-streaming house of windows, children in mourning looked at marvelous pictures.
A door slammed, and on the village square, the child waved his arms, understood by vanes and weathercocks everywhere, in the dazzling shower.
Madame xxx established a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the cathedral’s hundred thousand altars.
The caravans left. And the Splendide Hotel was built amid the tangled heap of ice floes and the polar night.
Since then the Moon has heard jackals cheeping in thyme deserts, – and eclogues in wooden shoes grumbling in the orchard. Then, in the budding purple forest, Eucharis told me that spring had come.
– Well up, pond, – Foam, roll on the bridge and above the woods; – black cloths and organs, – lightning and thunder, – rise and roll; – Waters and sorrows, rise and revive the Floods.
For since they subsided, – oh the precious stones shoveled under, and the full-blown flowers! – so boring! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her coals in the clay pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, and which we do not know.
Arthur Rimbaud (1886), translated from the French by John Ashbery
Sideshow
Very robust rascals. Several of them have exploited your worlds. With no pressing needs, and in no hurry to bring into play their brilliant faculties and their experience of your consciences. What mature men! Their eyes glazed like the midsummer night, red and black, tricolored, steel pierced with gold stars; facial features deformed, leaden, ashen, on fire; playful hoarseness! The cruel procedures of discarded finery! – There are a few young men – what would they think of Cherubino? – endowed with frightening voices and some dangerous resources. They are sent off to be buggered in cities, swathed in disgusting luxury.
O most violent Paradise of the enraged grimace! No comparison with your Fakirs and other theatrical buffoonery. Wearing improvised costumes in nightmarish taste they act out ballads, tragedies of thieves and demigods of a spirituality hitherto unknown to history or religions. Chinese, Hottentots, Gypsies, nincompoops, hyenas, Molochs, old dementias, sinister demons, they mingle populist, maternal tricks with bestial poses and tenderness. They would perform new plays and ‘nice girl’ songs. Expert jugglers, they transform
people and places, and resort to magnetic comedy. The eyes flame, the blood sings, the bones swell, tears and trickles of red descend. Their raillery or their terror lasts a minute, or entire months.
I alone know the plan of this savage sideshow.
Arthur Rimbaud (1886), translated from the French by John Ashbery
Genie
He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.
He is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life.
And we remember him and he travels … And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: ‘Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!’
He won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.
O his breaths, his heads, his racing; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action.
O fecundity of the spirit and immensity of the universe!
His body! The dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence!
The sight, the sight of him! all the ancient kneeling and suffering lifted in his wake.
His day! the abolition of all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music.
His footstep! migrations more vast than ancient invasions.
O him and us! pride more benevolent than wasted charities.
O world! and the clear song of new misfortunes!
He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.
Arthur Rimbaud (1886), translated from the French by John Ashbery
The End of the World
A Dream
I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country house.
The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the canopy of a bed.
I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking anxiously at one another.
Not one knows why he has come into this house and what people there are with him. On all the faces uneasiness and despondency … all in turn approach the windows and look about intently as though expecting something from without.
Then again they fall to wandering up and down. Among us is a small-sized boy; from time to time he whimpers in the same thin voice, ‘Father, I’m frightened!’ My heart turns sick at his whimper, and I too begin to be afraid … of what? I don’t know myself. Only I feel, there is coming nearer and nearer a great, great calamity.
The boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to escape from here! How stifling! How weary! how heavy … But escape is impossible.
That sky is like a shroud. And no wind … Is the air dead or what?
All at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks in the same piteous voice, ‘Look! look! the earth has fallen away!’
‘How? fallen away?’ Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped-out, black precipice.
We all crowded to the window … Horror froze our hearts. ‘Here it is … here it is!’ whispers one next me.
And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.
‘It is the sea!’ the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. ‘It will swallow us all up directly … Only how can it grow and rise upwards? To this precipice?’
And yet, it grows, grows enormously … Already there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance … One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole circle of the horizon.
It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of hell. Everything shuddered – and there, in this flying mass – was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of throats …
Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror …
The end of it! the end of all!
The child whimpered once more … I tried to clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch-black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness … darkness everlasting!
Scarcely breathing, I awoke.
March 1878
Ivan Turgenev (1883), translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
On the Sea
I was going from Hamburg to London in a small steamer. We were two passengers; I and a little female monkey, whom a Hamburg merchant was sending as a present to his English partner.
She was fastened by a light chain to one of the seats on deck, and was moving restlessly and whining in a little plaintive pipe like a bird’s. Every time I passed by her she stretched out her little, black, cold hand, and peeped up at me out of her little mournful, almost human eyes. I took her hand, and she ceased whining and moving restlessly about.
There was a dead calm. The sea stretched on all sides like a motionless sheet of leaden colour. It seemed narrowed and small; a thick fog overhung it, hiding the very mast-tops in cloud, and dazing and wearying the eyes with its soft obscurity. The sun hung, a dull red blur in this obscurity; but before evening it glowed with strange, mysterious, lurid light.
Long, straight folds, like the folds in some heavy silken stuff, passed one after another over the sea from the ship’s prow, and broadening as they passed, and wrinkling and widening, were smoothed out again with a shake, and vanished. The foam flew up, churned by the tediously thudding wheels; white as milk, with a faint hiss it broke up into serpentine eddies, and then melted together again and vanished too, swallowed up by the mist.
Persistent and plaintive as the monkey’s whine rang the small bell at the stern.
From time to time a porpoise swam up, and with a sudden roll disappeared below the scarcely ruffled surface.
And the captain, a silent man with a gloomy, sunburnt face, smoked a short pipe and angrily spat into the dull, stagnant sea.
To all my inquiries he responded by a disconnected grumble. I was obliged to turn to my sole companion, the monkey.
I sat down beside her; she ceased whining, and again held out her hand to me.
The clinging fog oppressed us both with its drowsy dampness; and buried in the same unconscious dreaminess, we sat side by side like brother and sister.
I smile now … but then I had another feeling. We are all children of one mother, and I was glad that the poor little beast was soothed and nestled so confidingly up to me, as to a brother.
November 1879
Ivan Turgenev (1883), translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
The Stranger
‘Whom lovest thou the best, enigmatical man, say, thy father, thy mother, thy sister, or thy brother?’
‘I have neither father, nor mother, nor sist
er, nor brother.’
‘Thy friends?’
‘You use there a word whose sense has to this day remained unknown to me.’
‘Thy fatherland?’
‘I know not in what latitude it is situated.’
‘Beauty?’
‘I would fain love it, godlike and immortal.’
‘Gold?’
‘I hate it as you hate God.’
‘Eh? What lovest thou, then, extraordinary stranger?’
‘I love the clouds … the clouds that pass … over there … the marvellous clouds!’
Charles Baudelaire (1869), translated from the French by Stuart Merrill
Windows
He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that dark or luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Across the waves of roofs, I can see a woman of middle age, wrinkled, poor, who is always leaning over something, and who never goes out. Out of her face, out of her dress, out of her attitude, out of nothing almost, I have made up the woman’s story, and sometimes I say it over to myself with tears.
If it had been a poor old man, I could have made up his just as easily.
And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others.
Perhaps you will say to me: ‘Are you sure that it is the real story?’ What does it matter, what does any reality outside of myself matter, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?
Charles Baudelaire (1869), translated from the French by Arthur Symons
The Bad Glazier