Hérodiade. But who would touch me, reverenced of lions?
Besides, I want no human thing; if, chiselled,
You see me with eyes lost in Paradise,
’Tis when I call to mind your milk of yore.
Nurse. Oh lamentable victim to its fate!
Hérodiade. Yes, it is for myself, deserted, that I flower!
Gardens of amethyst, you know too well—
Fled without end into the wise abysms
Dazzled and dazed; you unawared-of golds
Who guard your antique mellowness of light
Beneath the sombre slumber of a soil
Primordial and primitive; and you
Oh stones from which my pure and jewel eyes
Borrow their melody of clarity;
You, metals, which surrender to my hair
A fatal splendour and its massive gait!
Woman who speak of mortal, as for you,
Created in malignant centuries,
Born for the spite of caverns sybilline!
According as from calyx of my clothes
The white thrill of my nudity emerge,
Aroma of the fierce, the savage joys—
Woman who speak of mortal! prophesy
That if the tepid azure of the summer,
To whom the woman natively unveils,
Sees me in starlike shivering chastity,
I die!
I love the dread of being virgin
And I desire to live the terror of my hair—
To sense, inviolate reptile, on my couch
At evening, stir within my useless flesh
The frigid sparkle of your pallid lucence,
O you who die calcined with chastity,
White night of icicles and cruel snow!
And your lone sister, oh eternal sister,
My dream will mount towards you airily:
Already as the rare limpidity
Of one who dreamt it, in my native-land
Monotonous, I think myself alone,
And all around me lives in the idolatry
That in a mirror’s dozing calm reflects
Hérodiade of clear and diamond gaze....
Yea, last of spells! I feel it, I’m alone.
Nurse. And will you die then, Madam?
Hérodiade. Grandmother, no,
Be calm: withdrawing, pardon this flint heart,
But, if you wish, first close the shutters fast,
Seraphic azure smiles within the pane’s
Profundity. I loathe the lovely azure.
The waters lull themselves and, over there,
Do you not know a country where the sky,
So sinister, has all the heated looks
Of Venus who is burning in the leaves
At evening? I’ll thither ...
Light these tapers,
Mere childishness, you say, whose nimble flames
Weep a strange weeping ’mid the empty gold
And ...
Nurse. Now?
Hérodiade. Farewell.
You lie, oh naked flower of my lips!
For I await a thing unheard of yet.
Perhaps unconscious of their mystery,
Unconscious of your cries, you hurl the sobs
Supreme and bruisèd of an infancy
Perceiving dimly ’mid its reveries
Those frozen gems that separate at last.
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London