This is our doom. To walk for ever and ever
The wilderness unblest,
To weary soul and sense in vain endeavour
And find no coign of rest;
To feel the pulse of speech and passion thronging
On lips for ever dumb,
To gaze on parched skies relentless, longing
For clouds that will not come;
Thirsty, to drink of loathsome waters crawling
With nameless things obscene,
To feel the dews from heaven like fire-drops falling,
And neither shade nor screen;
To fill from springs illusive riddled vessels,
Like the Danaïdes,
To grapple with the wind that whirls and wrestles,
Knowing no lapse of ease;
To weave fantastic webs that shrink and crumble
Before they leave the loom,
To build with travail aëry towers that tumble
And temples like the tomb;
To watch the stately pomp and proud procession
Of splendid shapes and things,
And pine in silent solitary session
Because we have no wings;
To woo from confused sleep forlorn the dismal
Oblivion of despair;
To seek in sudden glimpse of dreams abysmal
Sights beautiful and rare,
And waking, wild with terror, see the vision
Cancelled in swift eclipse,
Mocked by the pallid phantoms of derision,
With spectral eyes and lips;
To turn in endless circles round these purlieus
With troops of spirits pale,
Whose everlasting song is like the curlew’s,
One ceaseless, changeless wail.
Mr Robertson gives four poems by this poet: “La Plainte des Damnés,” “Vers les Etoiles,” “Le Tombeau du Poète,” and “Hymne au Sommeil.” His translation of the last-named also appears in this anthology.
VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM. (1838-1889.)
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This famous French novelist and poet was born at St Brieuc, in Brittany, of parents who were each of old Breton stock. The full details of the life and work of Philippe-Auguste-Mathias de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, son of the Marquis Joseph de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and his wife Marie Françoise le Nepveu de Carfort, can be read in the recently-published Life, by the late Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey—an English translation of which, by Lady Mary Lloyd, was issued last year by Mr Heinemann. This distinguished writer lived in misfortune, and died amid darker shadows than those he had too long been bitterly acquainted with. His first volume of poems was published when he was little more than twenty years old—as Mr Robertson says, “one of the most remarkable ever written by so young a poet.” The young Breton poet came under the strong personal influence of Baudelaire, and in the process he lost much of his native Celtic fire and spirituality. Besides the poems given here, “Confession” (“D’aveu”) and “Discouragement” (“Découragement”), Mr Robertson translates, in his Century of French Verse, “Eblouissement” and “Les Présents.”
LECONTE DE LISLE. (1818-1894.)
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“The great Creole poet, Charles Marie René Leconte, known as Leconte de Lisle, was the child of a Breton father and a Gascon mother, and was born at St Paul, in the isle of Bourbon (Réunion) in 1818. He had the Celtic clearness of vision and love of beauty, and the vigour and courage of the Pyrenean race. In his youth he travelled through the East Indies, and the vivid impressions of tropical colour and warmth which are visible in his poetry derive their value from the personal observation of Nature in those regions” (W. J. Robertson, A Century of French Verse). Leconte de Lisle, one of the greatest of modern French poets, is assured of immortality by his beautiful trilogy:—Poèmes Antiques (1852), Poèmes Barbares (1862), and Poèmes Tragiques (1884). The reader who, unfamiliar with this poet, wishes to know more of Leconte de Lisle and his work, cannot do better than turn first to Mr Robertson’s biographical and critical memoir in A Century of French Verse. There, too, he will find five poems from Poèmes Antiques, including the long “Dies Iræ”; two from Poèmes Barbares, and two from Poèmes Tragiques. Of the two given here, the first (“The Black Panther”) is from Poèmes Barbares, and “The Spring” (“La Source”) from Poèmes Antiques. Leconte de Lisle strove after an ideal perfection of form. The spirit of that almost flawless work of his, is of intellectual emotion rather than of passion; but in colour, and splendour of imagery, no romanticist can surpass him. He is of the great minds who create, calm and serene. He is often classed with the two great master-spirits of modern German and French literature; but, while he has neither the lyric rush nor epic sweep of Victor Hugo, nor the philosophical modernity and innate human sentiment of Gœthe, he is much more akin to the latter than to the former. For the rest, to quote Mr Robertson, “he gives the noblest expression to human revolt and desire, to ideal dreams, and to the pure and sometimes pathetic love of external nature.”
LEO-KERMORVAN.
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Leo-Kermorvan has been represented here as one of the most distinctively Celtic of the contemporary Breton poets. In translating his “Taliesen,” as well as Louis Tiercelin’s “By Menec’hi Shore,” I have endeavoured to convey the atmosphere, as well as to be literal; and, partly to this end, and partly because of a personal preference for unrhymed metrical translation, have not ventured to make a rhymed paraphrase. M. Kermorvan is a poet worthy to be named with his two most notable living compatriots, Tristran Corbière and Charles Le Goffic.
LOUIS TIERCELIN.
[PAGE 351]
(See foregoing note.) M. Tiercelin is a Breton poet and critic, perhaps best known as co-editor of the Parnasse de la Bretagne. No more characteristic Breton poem, apart from folk-poetry, could close Lyra Celtica. It is the keynote of the poetry that is common to all the Celtic races.