J'étais allé jusu'au fond du jardin,
Quand dans la nuit une invisible main
Me terrassa plus forte que moi—
Une voix me dit: C'est pour ta joie.
[(Tr. 58)]
Dilectus meus descendit in hortum ... but here the poet, as chaste, is less sensual: The Orient has thrown a surplice over an Occidental soul, and if he still cultivates large white lilies in his enclosed garden, he has learned the pleasure of escaping, by secret paths known to fairies, "in the forest noiselessly laughing", as they gather bindweed, broom,
Et les fleurettes aventurières le long des haies.
[(Tr. 59)]
This poem of twenty-four leaves is doubtless the most delicious little book of love verses given us since the Fêtes Galantes, and with the Chansons d'amant are perhaps the only verses of these last years where sentiment dare confess in utter frankness, with the perfect and touching grace of divine sincerity. If, in some of these pages, there still remains a touch of rhetoric, it is because Kahn, even at the feet of the Sulamite, has not renounced the pleasure of surprising by the ever novel deftness of the jongleur and virtuoso, and if he sometimes treats the French language tyrannically, it is that for him she has always had the affectionate yieldings of a slave. He abuses his power a little, giving some words meanings that hang on the skirts of others, making phrases yield to a too summary syntax, but these are mischievous habits not exclusively personal to him. His science of rhythm and mastery in wielding free verse, he borrows from no one.
Was Kahn the first? To whom do we owe free verse? To Rimbaud, whose Illuminations appeared in Vogue in 1886, to Laforgue, who at the same period, in the same precious little review,—conducted by Kahn—published Légende and Solo de lune, and, finally, to Kahn himself; at that time he wrote:
Void l'allégresse des âmes d'automne,
La Ville s'évapore en illusions proches,
Void se voiler de violet et d'orangé les porches
De la nuit sans lune
Princesse, qu'as tu fait de ta tiare orfévrée?
[(Tr. 60)]
—and particularly to Walt Whitman, whose majestic license was then beginning to be appreciated.
How joyfully this tiny Vogue, which today sells at the price of miniature parchments, was read under the galleries of the Odéon by timid youths drunk with the odor of novelty which these pale little pages exhaled.
Kahn's last collection, la Pluie et le Beau temps, has not changed our opinion of his talent and originality: he remains equal to himself with his two tendencies, here less in harmony, towards sentiment and the picturesque, quite apparent if one compares with Image, that so mournful hymn,
O Jésus couronné de ronces,
Qui saigne en tous coeurs meurtris,
[(Tr. 61)]