Or again:
Our passions breathe their own wild harmony,
And pour out music at a clinging kiss.
Sing on, O Soul, our lyric of desire,
For God Himself is in the melody.
Meanwhile the author of Les Baisers, always elegantly terre-à-terre, formulates his more concrete desires in an Alexandrine worthy of Racine:
Viens. Je veux dégrafer moi-même ton corsage.
The desire to involve the cosmos in our emotions is by no means confined to the poetess of Songs of Love and Life. In certain cases we are all apt to invoke the universe in an attempt to explain and account for emotions whose intensity seems almost inexplicable. This is particularly true of the emotions aroused in us by the contemplation of beauty. Why we should feel so strongly when confronted with certain forms and colours, certain sounds, certain verbal suggestions of form and harmony—why the thing which we call beauty should move us at all—goodness only knows. In order to explain the phenomenon, poets have involved the universe in the matter, asserting that they are moved by the contemplation of physical beauty because it is the symbol of the divine. The intensities of physical passion have presented the same problem. Ashamed of admitting that such feelings can have a purely sublunary cause, we affirm, like the Australian poetess, that “God Himself is in the melody.” That, we argue, can be the only explanation for the violence of the emotion. This view of the matter is particularly common in a country with fundamental puritanic traditions like England, where the dry, matter-of-fact attitude of the French seems almost shocking. The puritan feels bound to justify the facts of beauty and volupté. They must be in some way made moral before he can accept them. The French unpuritanic mind accepts the facts as they are tendered to it by experience, at their face value.
XIV: HOW THE DAYS DRAW IN!
The autumn equinox is close upon us with all its presages of mortality, a shortening day, a colder and longer night. How the days draw in! Fear of ridicule hardly allows one to make the melancholy constatation. It is a conversational gambit that, like fool’s mate, can only be used against the simplest and least experienced of players. And yet how much of the world’s most moving poetry is nothing but a variation on the theme of this in-drawing day! The certainty of death has inspired more poetry than the hope of immortality. The visible transience of frail and lovely matter has impressed itself more profoundly on the mind of man than the notion of spiritual permanence.