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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
MEMORIES, by HENRY BATAILLE
First Line: Memories are rooms without a lock
Last Line: And yet I feel dim eyelids close within me.
Subject(s): Memory; Silence; Solitude; Loneliness
First Line: Memories are rooms without a lock
Last Line: And yet I feel dim eyelids close within me.
Subject(s): Memory; Silence; Solitude; Loneliness
Memories are rooms without a lock,
Empty rooms we no longer dare to enter
For in them once old relatives have died.
We live in the house where there are these closed rooms,
We know that they are still there, that this one is
The blue room, that the rose. And so the house
Fills up with solitude, and we smile on.
When it wills, I gather up the passing memory,
And I say: "Go in there. I'll come to see you soon."
I know throughout my life it's waiting there
But sometimes I forget to go and see it.—
There are so many thus in the old house.
They are resigned to our forgetfulness,
And if I do not come tonight, nor soon,
Ask of my heart no more than you ask of life ...
I know they're sleeping there, behind the walls,
I therefore have no need to go to find them;
I can see their windows as I walk the road,
And it will be so until we die of them.
Yet sometimes I feel, amid the daily shadows,
An indeterminate shudder, and a cold
Whose hidden source I know not, and I pass ...
Yet every time it is a mourning signal.
A tremor has secretly come to give us word
That a memory has gone forth, or has died ...
It is not easy to tell which memory,
One is so old, one scarcely can remember ...
And yet I feel dim eyelids close within me.
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