Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ODE TO MARCEL PROUST, by PAUL MORAND


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ODE TO MARCEL PROUST, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Shade / born of the fumes of your fumigation
Last Line: Of black and pearl-grey dandy?
Subject(s): Proust, Marcel (1871-1922)


Shade
born of the fumes of your fumigations,
face and voice
devoured
by nocturnal use,
Celeste,
gently for all her harshness steeps me in the fluid darkness
of your room
redolent of fresh-pulled corks and dying embers.
Behind the screen of manuscript
under the pale lamp that is sticky as jam
your face lies on a chalk-white bolster.
You hold forth your hands gloved in silken floss:
silently your beard thrusts forth
from the ends of your cheeks.

I say:
You seem to be doing pretty well.
You answer:
Friend, three times today I was on the point of death.

Your windows, eternally closed,
withhold you from Boulevard Haussman
filled to the side walls
with the metal clangor of trams.
Perhaps you have never seen the sun. ...
But, like Lemoine, you have reconstructed it
so well
that in the night your fruit trees
have yielded blossoms.
Your night is not our night:
it is full of white gleamings
of rare orchids and of Odette's gowns,
of champagne glasses and chandeliers
and the frilled shirt-fronts of General de Froberville.
Your voice, white too, wends through so long a sentence
it seems to fold, when like a patient
complaining in his sleep
you say they've brought you a tremendous sorrow.

Proust, to what revels do you go by night
that you return with eyes so worn, so lucid?
What frights beyond our scope have come to you
that you are so indulgent and so kind?
and so aware of the travail of soul
and of what passes within dwellings
and that love brings ill?
Were they dread vigils that have left in you
the rosy bloom
of the Jacques Emile-Blanche portrait?—
you here, tonight,
steeped in the yielding pallor of the tapers
but happy that we believe in your calm agony
of black and pearl-grey dandy?





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