Contemporary Belgian Poetry / Selected and Translated by Jethro Bithell

by Unknown

IWAN GILKIN.

1858—.

PSYCHOLOGY.
A surgeon, I the souls of men dissect,
Bending my feverish brow above their shameless
Perversions, sins, and vices, all their nameless
Primitive lusts and appetites unchecked.
Upon my marble men and women spread
Their open bellies, where I find the hidden
Ulcers of passions filthy and forbidden,
And probe the secret wounds of dramas dread.
Then, while my arms with scrofulous blood are dyed,
I note in poems clear with scrupulous art
What my keen eyes in these dark deeps descried.
And if I need a subject, I am able
To stretch myself on the dissecting table,
And drive the scalpel into my own heart.
THE CAPITAL.
A dolorous fruit is the vast capital.
Its bursten skin and pulp too ripened dye
Opulently their rich rottenness
With green gold, violet, and red phosphorus.
Oozing a sickly sweet, thick, cancerous juice,
Its spongy flesh melts in the mouth, and in
Its pensive poisons germinate the rank,
Perverted sins of fever-tortured brains.
So strange its spice, so exquisite its taste,—
A macerated ginger in a rare elixir,—
I plunged my teeth in it with greedy haste.
But dizziness I ate, and madness drank.
And that is why I trail a debile frame,
With my youth dying in the husk of my strength.
THE PENITENT.
The penitent of cities damned am I.
In shameful taverns where rank liquors flow,
And in new Sodoms viciously aglow,
Where outrage hides its lusts with murder nigh,
I watch in flaring nights with mournful eye,
And shuddering hear what monsters still we grow.
And all the crimes of men oppress me so
I call for vengeance to the angered sky.
Wrathful as prophets went in Holy Writ,
I walk with haggard cheek in public places,
Confessing sins that I do not commit.
And the Pharisees cry out with upturned faces:
"I thank thee, God, that I am not as this
Infamous poet by thy judgment is!"
"ET ERITIS SICUT DII."
Sick Artist, from the world around thee shrinking
To nurse the high ideal of thine Art,
Give thou no place to Nature in thy thinking,
That foolish, fertile slut obscene and stinking—
To the Artificial consecrate thy heart.
In spite of reed-pipes and loud songs of marriage,
Be thou remote, Reality desert,
The blood and flesh of women proud of carriage,
The flabby flesh of women thou disparage,
Deny their beauty which is only dirt.
Are thy tired spirit and thy parched mouth aching
For the cooling, carnal draught of their caress?
This is a thirst that thou canst best be slaking,
Swooning among thy lamp-lit bottles, breaking
The odorous seals of drunken dizziness.
Dream drunk with rum, whose tropic-heated spices
Ferment into a scented wine that joins
Thy subtle spirit in voluptuous vices
With negro women whose smooth flesh entices
Thy lubric hand to their anointed loins.
Drink kirsch, as turbulent as cascades shaded
By forests where the maidens bathe their feet;
Musked maraschino, sucked by mouths pomaded
In the sick air of brothels golden-braided
By those who queen it on the yielding seat;
And, hypocrite with ice one cannot sunder
Out of his flame, drink kümmel, whose bright feast
Of boreal snow-masked fire evokes the wonder
Of roses under snow, O roses ... under
Archangel heavens women of the East.
And, for its green of bindweed-tangled fancies,
Drink absinthe, which shall open out to thee
Those forests where the fairy Vivien dances,
And the sage Merlin with her feet entrances
In the hoarse brushwood by the bitter sea.
Then to thy reeling brain shall dreams come sailing,
Upon the calm bed where thy body sank,
And thou shalt see dissolved in shadows paling,
All earthly things around thee, failing, failing,
While brighter surge the visions rank on rank.
Behold! Among the wan blue vapours, steaming
Before the scented, sounding sunrise, glows
A belt of glaciers whose thin peaks of dreaming
Mirrored upon an azure lake are gleaming
In the tropic valley guarded by their snows.
The leaves of mangoes, palms, and fig-trees sighing
Are wafting coolness o'er the billowing grass,
Where, garlanded like flowers, are women lying,
Bathing their lily limbs, beneath the flying
Jewels of furtive humming-birds that pass.
And a cascade of dazzling nakednesses
Falls from the peaks of glaciers in shoals,
And every following body holds and presses
The one that went before, holds and caresses;
A living stream of beauty rolls and rolls.
Arms, loins, and thighs are linked and intertwining,
Lightnings are playing on a vaporous mesh
Of luminous hair and supple limbs combining,
And from the lofty peaks of glaciers shining
For ever falling are new waves of flesh.
Drink every drop of this pure wine, and waste
In thine embraces all these limbs unreal.
Lie in thy bed of snow, and, undebased,
Enjoy all flesh in thine own flesh, and taste
The monstrous joy of soiling the Ideal.
VENGEANCE.
Woman with heart stabbed by a hidden wrong,
Whose vengeful fingers, proud, and tapering long,
Have strapped thy naked lover in his sleep
Down to the bed, where now his wild eyes weep
Their scalding tears like vitriol, and stare
On broken furniture and carpets where
Weapons, clothes, flowers are in mad medley cast,
In sheets still with his kisses warm, thou hast
To soldiers prostituted thee, and spent
Their vigour with thy body's vehement
Surging of spasms quivering under them;
But what thought, like a hideous diadem
Of thorns, hath rent thy forehead, when the third,
His white flesh scarcely sated, having heard
Thy lustful moaning till his heart grew sick,
Looked, as a bitch looks beaten with a stick,
To the black, frantic face of thy betrayer,
And asked with plaintive murmur: "Shall I slay her?"
THE SONG OF THE FORGES.
O frenzied forges with your noise and blaring,
Red, reeking fires that comb dishevelled skies,
Your hollow rumbling is like stifled swearing,
And the grassed earth about you burns and dies.
When blind, mad man, intent on gain and plunder,
Thinks he is matter's master, in your maw
Lugubriously rolls a hollow thunder,
That says: We forge and forge, without a flaw,
The chains from which thou hast not wit to save thee,
O foolish man! we rivet link by link
The shackles which for ever shall enslave thee.
Sweat, pant, and fill the furnace to the brink,
Throw in the coal, and pour the crackling casting
Through the cut sand, beat, crush the pig to shape,
Temper the sword, sheet, deck, and rig with masting
The tyrant ships that sweep the sea with grape,
Crowd with machines the hamlet and the haven,
To prison thee more deep than dungeons held
In durance making thee a pauper craven...
Stupid humanity! we weld and weld
With the vile toil disease beyond reclaiming,
And imbecility, and discontent,
Murder, and hate that sets the mansion flaming,
Bloody revolt and heavy punishment.
We forge the fate of every generation;
We crush the father and the child as well,
Spitting at heavens that shake with consternation
The soot and coal of our relentless hell!
See! to the stainless blue of skies upcurling
Our towering chimneys' belched, polluted breath,
Above the waste and ravaged lands unfurling
Their sable flags of slavery and death!
HERMAPHRODITE.
Rosy and naked, pure as a flower divine,
The mystic being of old stories sleeps,
Stretched in the grass like a bough of eglantine,
In the flowery clearing in the forest deeps.
Upon his folded arm he rests his head;
The sleeping kisses of the sun repose
Upon his delicate body softly spread,
And shimmer from his shoulders to his toes.
And near him, with a murmur as of bees,
Runs the clear brook through grass and lily flowers,
Under the fig-trees' laden boughs, and flees,
Winding along the tangled secret bowers.
Sweet sorcery of the flesh! A sphinx above thee
Asks the thrilled senses to resolve desires!
With shame and terror tremble all who love thee,
And they who see thee burn with thousand fires.
Seeing thy more than human loveliness
Women and youths their envious glances dart;
They sigh with lowered eyes, and weep, and press
Sometimes their hand upon their maddened heart.
"Where is the heavenly goddess," so they cry,
"Whose loveliness can match thy perfect frame?
And what young god, all sun and spring, can vie
With all this freshness blent with tender flame?"
O to drink madly on one mouth the kisses
Of Aphrodite and Adonis both,
And, trembling, to discover all blent blisses
In the same frame to no perversions loth!
Faust had left Margaret for thee, and lewd
Anacreon had never lost a day on
Bathyllus, Sappho would not have pursued
In her escape Erinna, no nor Phaon.
Under thy foot earth lapped with pallid flames
Trembles, and all the flowers die where it hovers
Man clips no more the woman, and hot dames
Enlace their arms no more around young lover
O last ideal of decaying races,
Mortal revealer of best beauties, thy
Poisons poured lavishly in thine embraces
Have made the ancient cities rot and die.
And now to us thou comest, while uncloses
Under thy feet a dawn that pales the day's;
And poets, mad with incense and with roses,
Laud thee with chants of glory, love, and praise.
Sweet being, grant to us thy sweetest blisses!
We drag ourselves under thy conquering feet,
While, in a downy drunkenness, thy kisses
Gather our last and loveliest heart's beat.
THE DAYS OF YORE.
I have inhaled love like a garland sprent
With morning dew, and fragrant with a scent
That set my kisses fluttering over it,
As butterflies of silk and velvet flit.
And savoured it like some fruit from the South,
Whose luscious pulp melts slowly in the mouth.
And, cups of sapphire effervescing bright,
Blue eyes have made me drunk with spring's delight!
And, ruby cups brimmed with a blood that seethed,
Lips have a dizziness upon me breathed!...
—Fall o'er the past, ye mists of memory!
And now, thou deep, swart night envelop me!
In thy wan winding-sheet my heart enfold,
To sleep alone, and motionless, and cold.

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