Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN, by STEPHANE MALLARME


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN, by             Poem Explanation         Poet's Biography
First Line: Those nymphs, I would perpetuate them
Last Line: I am to see the shadow into which ye grew.


Those nymphs, I would perpetuate them.

Even so clear
Their coloring light, it dances in the atmosphere
Heavy with leafy sleeps.

Was it a dream I loved?

My doubt, a mass of night primeval, is removed
In many a subtle branch which proves, being still these very
Woods, that, alas, I gave myself all solitary
For triumph the default ideal of the rose.
Let us reflect

if women of whom thou thus dost gloze
Image a longing of thy senses fanciful!
Faun, the illusion is escaping from the cool
Blue eyes, even as a spring in tears, of the more chaste:
The other, though, all sighs, thou sayest is to contrast
Even as a daytime zephyr warm upon thy fleece!
Not so! through the exhausted swoon and motionless
Stifling with heats the morning fresh if it rebels,
Murmurs that water only which my flute expels
On the grove sprayed with notes; and the one breath of air
Out of the two pipes prompt in its exhaling ere
It scatters all around the sound in a dry sprinkle,
Is, over the horizon that has not one wrinkle,
The visible and tranquil breath illusory
Of inspiration, which once more attains the sky.

O ye Sicilian borders of a quiet swamp
Which, to the sun's despite, is plundered by my pomp,
Tacit beneath the flowers of sparkles, CELEBRATE
"How I cut here the hollow rushes subjugate
By skill; when on the glaucous gold of verdurings
Remote which dedicate their vine unto the springs,
Billows a whiteness animal in the repose:
And how in the preluding slow where the pipe grows,
That flight of swans, ah no! of naiads springs away
Or dives . . ."

Inert, all is afire in tawny day,
Not showing by what art dashed off in company
Too much of hymen wished by one who strikes the key:
Then shall I waken to the primal zeal, upright
And solitary in a flood antique of light,
Lilies! and of you all the one for artlessness.

Other than that soft nothing which their lips express,
The kiss, which keeps the faithless safe by its low sound,
My breast, virgin of proof, bears witness to a wound
Mysterious, occasioned by some august tooth;
But hush! there needs for confidant of such a truth
The large and double reed performed upon by day:
Which, as it sucks the trouble of the cheek away,
Dreams, in a long extended solo, of amusing
The beauty of the neighbourhood by a confusing
False of that beauty and our song infatuated;
And that as high as love itself is modulated
It may make vanish from the comm on dream of thighs
Immaculate or backs pursued by my closed eyes,
A loud and ineffectual monotonous line.

Try then to flower again, pipe of the flights, malign
Syrinx, upon the lakes where thou for me must wait!
I, of my rumor proud, will at great length relate
Of goddesses, and by idolatrous imagery
Remove the girdles yet from their obscurity:
Just so, when from the grapes I have sucked out the lustre,
Laugher, I lift to summer skies the empty cluster
To banish a regret by trickery dispersed,
And blowing into the translucent skins, athirst
For drunkenness, until the evening I look through.

O nymphs, let us inflate some MEMORIES new.
"My eye, piercing the reeds, transfixed each heavenly
Neck, which beneath the river drowns its ardency
With cries of anger to the heaven of the wood;
And the resplendent bath of tresses is bestrewed
In glitterings and quiverings, O diamonds!
I run; when, at my feet, are coupled (with their wounds
Of languor tasted in that pang of being twain)
These slumberers in just their arms at hazard lain;
Without unclasping them I lift them, and invade
This shrubbery, detested by the frivolous shade,
Of roses spending in the sun all fragrancy,
Where likewise in the day consumed may our sport be."
Curse of the virgins, I adore thee, O delight
Ferocious of the naked burdens blest that fight
To shun my lip afire which, as a flash of lightning
Trembles, is drinking from the flesh the secret frightening:
From the unkind one's feet to bosoms of the sky,
Who yields at once an innocence, all watery
With foolish tears or with less doleful vaporing.
"My crime, it is that I; glad to be conquering
Those traitorous fears, divided the disheveled heap
Of kisses, which the gods would well commingled keep;
For hardly had I tried to hide an ardent smile
Under the creases glad of one (holding the while
By a mere finger, so that thus her plumy white
Might color at her sister's passion now alight,
The little one naive who never blushed at all:)
When from my arms, undone by deaths equivocal,
That prey of mine, forevermore ingrate, gets free,
Pitiless of the sob intoxicating me."

Well! to the bliss by others shall I yet be led
With their hair knotted to the horns upon my head:
Thou knowest, my passion, how, all purple and full grown,
Each pomegranate bursts and with the bees makes moan;
And blood of ours, possessed by what it would acquire,
Flows for the whole eternal swarm of the desire.
Now when this wood with gold and cinders is illumed,
A festival is raised among the leaves consumed.
Etna! it is in thee by Venus visited
With her ingenuous heels posed on thy lava bed,
When rumbles a sleep unhappy or fades away the glow.
I hold the queen!

O certain castigation.

No,

But empty of words the spirit and this body aswoon
At last surrender to the haughty hush of noon:
Sleep now in the oblivion of the blasphemy,
Stretched on the thirsty sand and as I love to be
Mouth open to the potent wine-star!

Couple, adieu;
I am to see the shadow into which ye grew.





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