"Hola-hé! Hola-ho! Stridionla, Stridionla, Stridionla! Stridionlaire!"
to her ancient waves, puissant warriors with venerable beards of foam, lashes them to conquer Space and mount to the assault of the grinning Stars. And missiles are there in her Reservoir of Death—"petrified bodies, bodies of steel, embers and gold, harder than the diamond, the suicides whose courage failed beneath the weight of their heart, that furnace of stars, those who died for that they stoked within their blood the fire of the Ideal, the great flame of the Absolute that encompassed them." And for an army has she the legions of her amazon cavalry, the veterans of the Sea, the great waves, the riotous, prancing narwhals with their scaly rings, the typhoons, the cyclones and the haughty trombes (water-spouts), "draping around their loins their fuliginous veils, or lifting masses of darkness in their great open arms." And so this feud of the elements proceeds from climax to climax, from crescendo to crescendo, till the astral fortresses succumb to the shock of an infernal charge, and the last star expires "with her pupils of grey shadow imploring the Unknown, oh how sweetly."
No doubt the poem almost reels at times as though intoxicated with the excesses of its own imagery. Yet making all due discount for this healthy turgidity of adolescence, it is impossible to dispute the authentic poetical value of this brilliant epic.
By so masterly a grasp is the metre handled that the reader, quite oblivious of the immaterial question of whether he is perusing verse or prose, is only conscious of the ideas and emotions themselves. The following passage is typical not only of the poem's potency of expression, but of the intimate union which is effected between the meaning and the form.
"C'est ainsi que passe le Simoun,
aiguillonant sa furie de désert en désert,
avec son escorte caracolante
de sables soulevés tout ruisselants de feu;
c'est ainsi que le Simoun galope
sur l'océan figé des sables,
en balangant son torse géant d'idole barbare
sur des fuyantes croupes d'onagres affolés."
In the series of poems, however, known as Destruction,
"Since there is only splendour in this word of terror
And of crushing force like a Cyclopæan hammer,"
that boyish robustness which we have seen playing so naïvely in the romantic limbo, has attained the solidity of manhood. Finding it no longer necessary to have recourse for his subject-matter to some set theme of an Elemental War, the author reproduces the experiences of his own inner life in a new lyrical language, whose rhythm vibrates responsively to every thrill of its creator's spirit, and takes faithfully every colour of his chameleon soul.
For the poet is now reverential:
"Tu es infinie et divine, o Mer, et je le sais
de par le jurement de tes lèvres, écumantes
de par ton jurement que répercutent de plage en plage
les echos attentifs ainsi que des guetteurs."