Classic and Contemporary Poetry
HERODIADE, by STEPHANE MALLARME Poem Explanation Poet's Biography First Line: For whom, consumed with anguish, do you keep the unseen splendor Last Line: Its frigid jewels becoming separate at last. | ||||||||
NURSE: . . . For whom, consumed With anguish, do you keep the unseen splendor And vain mystery of your being? HERODIADE: For myself. NURSE: Poor flower growing alone without a flutter Save for its shadow seen listless in the water. HERODIADE: Go, your pity with your irony keep. NURSE: Yet explain: O no, innocent child! This triumphant disdain must one day lessen. HERODIADE: But who would touch me, by the lions respected? I want, regardless, nothing human, and if with my eyes Lost in paradise you see me rapt, It is with remembering your milk once drunk. NURSE: Lamentable victim to her destiny offered! HERODIADE: Yes, it is for myself, for myself I flower secluded! You know this, gardens of amethyst, endlessly Buried in knowing abysses bedazzling, You, unfathomed gold guarding your ancient luster Under the dark sleep of a primeval soil, You, precious stones wherefrom my eyes like flawless gems Borrow their melodious shimmer, and you Metallics which lend my youthful tresses Their massive allure and a fatal splendor! As for you, woman born in centuries iniquitous With the sins of sibylline caves Who of a mortal speak! Who would from the calyxes Of my robes, fragrant of fierce delights, Have the pale tremor of my nudity emerge, Foretell that if the tepid azure of summer, Toward which innately woman unveils, In my pudency of tremulous star should see me, I die! I love the terror of being virgin and I fain Would live amid the dread my hair instills in me That I may, at evening, retired to my bed, Inviolate reptile, feel in my useless flesh The chill scintillation of your pallid light, You who burn with chastity, who die to yourself, White night of icicles and cruel snow! And your solitary sister, O my sister eternal Toward you my dream shall rise: indeed so rarely Limpid this heart brooding on it I feel I am alone in my monotonous homeland And all around me dwell in idolatry Of a mirror which reflects in its changeless calm Herodiade of the pristine diamond gaze . . . O final bliss, yes, I feel it, I am alone! NURSE: Madame, are you going to die then? HERODIADE: No, poor grandam, Be calm and, taking your leave, forgive this hard heart, But first, if you will, draw to the blinds, The seraphic azure smiles in the deep windowpanes, And I, I detest the beauteous azure! Yonder Billows rock, and do you not know of a country there Where the sinister sky has the hated mien Of Venus burning in the leafage at night: There would I go. Light again those tapers, Childishness, you say, whose wax of feeble flame Weeps amid futile gold some foreign tear And . . . NURSE: Now? HERODIADE: Good night. O nude flower Of my lips, you lie. I do wait some thing unknown Or, perhaps, heedless of the mystery and your cries, You loose the ultimate and wounded sobs Of a childhood amidst its reveries sensing Its frigid jewels becoming separate at last. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A THROW OF THE DICE NEVER WILL ABOLISH CHANCE by STEPHANE MALLARME AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: ECLOGUE by STEPHANE MALLARME ANOTHER FAN (OF MADEMOISELLE MALLARME) by STEPHANE MALLARME APPARITION by STEPHANE MALLARME BESTOWAL OF THE POEM by STEPHANE MALLARME HERODIAS, SELECTION by STEPHANE MALLARME LITTLE AIR: 1 by STEPHANE MALLARME LITTLE AIR: 2 by STEPHANE MALLARME |
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