A great part of this book on The Kingdom of Lovers is written in singular verses. The three-lined and breathlessly monotonous rhythm is rather like that of the Stabat Mater, only that the third line of every strophe reproduces the same rhyme throughout the entire work, and rests on an abstract idea from which the two preceding lines rise, like twin flowers of obscurity and restlessness. We can imagine this hollow music floating through the spiritual dreams of the maids of Memlinck, while their secret senses, their faces, and their little hands all unite in ecstasy; but unhappily a translation cannot reproduce its taste of darkness and of bread soaked in the night, nor catch the image of the tear-brightened gloom, of ice mingled with fire, of oppression without hope, which we feel throughout the work. I shall therefore translate only one of these dark poems, the subject of which is the “Gift of Intelligence.”
“He who seeks that gift to light him
Must rise beyond his nature,
To the highest height of being.
Brightness without measure
There shall he perceive it
In primal purity.
Through his soul will flow
The light of heavenly truth,
And he in it shall vanish.