The child that came that evening was naked. He gathered roses in the dusk, he sobbed at having come, he retreated before his shadow. It is like him, naked, that my destiny has recognized itself.
Goat's leaf grows under my May forest. The sun drops in gold through the heavy gloom. A roe-buck stirs in the leaves he gathers. The breeze in the frieze of birches passes from leaf to leaf.
The grasses are silvered in my May field. There the sun gleams like a play of swords. A bee vibrates to the lilies of the valley in the lane of tall grouped flowers, towards the bed of the stream. The breeze sings in the frieze of the ash-trees.
Where is the Marguerite, O gué, o gué, where is the Marguerite? She is in her château, weary and tired at heart, She is in her hamlet, gay and childish at heart. She is in her grave, let us gather there the lily-of-the-valley, O gué, the Marguerite.
Where are our beloved ones? They are in the grave; they are happier in a fairer sojourn.
Of what use is beauty? Its use is to go in earth, to be eaten by worms, to be eaten by worms....
Do you not feel in you the opulence of being only for yourself beautiful, O Sea, and of being yourself?
Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words issue; man passes there through forests of symbols watching him with friendly gaze.
Like long echoes blended in distance to deep, dim unity, vast as night and clear as day, the perfumes, colors and sounds answer each other.
The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books. To fly yonder! I feel that the birds are drunk At being among the unknown foam and the heavens....
An autumn strewn with stains of redness.... And you were the sobbing whiteness of lilies.... I bring you the child of an Idumean night.... His neck will shake off this white agony....
The dream, in a heliotrope robe, and her thought on her fingers, with loosened girdle, passes, lightly grazing souls with her cloud train, to the extinct rhythm of a music of other times.
In the lingering fragrance of an evening of the last days.
The roses of the west shed their leaves on the stream; and, in the pale emotion of the falling evening, is evoked an autumnal park where, on a bench, dreams my youth, already sober as a widow.