Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NOTRE DAME, by THEOPHILE GAUTIER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NOTRE DAME, by             Poem Explanation         Poet's Biography
First Line: Often at evening, when the summer sun
Alternate Author Name(s): Theo, Le Bon
Subject(s): Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris



I

Weary of this dead calm where faded in advance,
Like water that falls asleep, our years languish;
Tired of stifling my life in a narrow living room,
With young fools and frivolous women,
Exchanging banal words without profit;
Tired of always touching my horizon with my finger.

To make me whole again and widen my soul,
Your book in my pocket, at the towers of Notre-Dame;
I have often gone, Victor,
At eight o'clock, in summer, when the sun sets,
And its tawny disc, at the edge of the roofs it touches,
Floats like a big golden balloon.

Everything shimmers and shines; the painter and the poet
Find colors there to load their palette,
And fiery paintings that will burn your eyes;
They are only sapphires, carnelians, opals,
Tones that would make Rubens and Titian look pale;
Ithuriel spreads her jewel in the skies.

Mist cathedrals with fantastic arches;
Mountains of vapor, colonnades, porticos,
Doubled by the ice of water,
The breeze which plays with them and tears their fringes,
Prints, by rolling them, a thousand strange shapes
On the disheveled clouds.

As, for its good evening, in a richer hue,
The day that flees covers the holy cathedral,
Outlined in broad strokes on the fiery horizon;
And the twin towers, these stone canticles,
Seem like the two great arms that the city in prayer,
Before falling asleep, raises towards its God.

Like its patroness, to its Gothic head,
The old church attaches a mystical glory
Made with the splendors of the evening;
The roses in the stained glass windows, in sparkling red,
suddenly flake off, and like pupils,
open all round to see.

The blossoming nave, between its thin ribs,
Seems like a giant crab moving its claws,
An enormous spider, like networks,
Throwing to the front of the towers, to the black side of the walls,
In aerial threads, in delicate meshes,
Its tulles of granite, its lacework of arches.

In the lead diamonds of the diaphanous stained glass window,
Fresher than the gardens of Alcine or Morgane,
Under a warm kiss of sun,
Strangely populated by heraldic monsters,
Suddenly a hundred magical flowerbeds bloom
With azure and vermilion flowers.

Legends of yesteryear, marvelous stories
Written in stone, hells and purgatories,
Devoutly cut by naive scissors;
Pedestals of the portal, which mourn their statues,
Cut down by men and not by time,
Unicorns, werewolves, chimerical birds,

Mastiffs howling at the end of the gutters; tarasques,
Wurms and basilisks, dragons and fanciful dwarves,
Knights conquering giants,
Bundles of heavy pillars, sheaves of columns,
Myriads of saints rolled into collars,
Around the three gaping porches.

Lancets, pendants, warheads, slender clovers
Where the crazy arabesque hangs its lace
And its goldwork, crafted with great labor;
Gables with open holes, jagged spiers,
Needles of crows and angels surmounted,
The cathedral shines like an enamel jewel!
II

But what is this? when in the shadows you
follow the slender staircase with countless spirals
And you finally see the blue again,
The void above and below the abyss,
A fear seizes you, a sublime vertigo
As you feel feel so close to God!

As under the bird that perches there, a branch
Under your feet that it flees, the tower quivers and leans,
The drunken sky totters and waltzes around you;
The abyss opens its mouth, and the spirit of vertigo,
Lashing you with its wing in sneering acrobatics
And makes the guardrails tremble at the front of the towers,

The angular attics, with their weather vanes,
Cut out, as they pass, strange silhouettes
In the depths of your dazzled eye,
And in the immense abyss where the crow whirls,
Apocalyptic beast, writhing barks,
Paris brilliant, unheard of!

Oh ! your heart beats, dominating from this peak,
Self, puny and small, a city thus made;
To be able, with a single glance, to embrace this great whole,
Standing up there, closer to the sky than to the earth,
Like the gliding eagle, seeing within the crater,
Far, far away, the smoke and the lava which is boiling!

From the ramp, where the wind, through the Arabian clovers,
Playing, repeats the last syllables
Of the seraph's hosanna;
See moving there, among the vague mists,
This sea of houses whose roofs are the waves;
Hearing him whisper endlessly;

How big it is! how beautiful ! the frail chimneys,
With their smoky turbans crowned at all times,
On the saffron sky trace their black profiles,
And the oblique light, with bold edges,
Throwing rich fires on all sides
In the mirror of the river enshrines a hundred mirrors.

As in a joyous ball, a young girl's breast,
In the light of the torches lights up and sparkles
Under the jewels and finery;
In the light of the sunset, the water lights up, and the Seine
Cradles more jewels, certainly, than the queen ever
wears on her collar on great days.

Needles, towers, domes, domes
whose slate fronts shine like helms,
Walls torn with shadow and light, roofs
of all colors, street nets,
Muffled palaces, where, like warts,
Cling vices and narrow hovels!

Here, there, in front of you, behind, to the right, to the left,
Houses! houses ! in the evening you sketch
One hundred thousand with a bolt of fire!
Under the same horizon, Tyre, Babylon and Rome,
Prodigious mass, chaos made by human hands,
Which one could believe made by God!
III

And yet, as beautiful as it is, O Notre-Dame,
Paris thus dressed in its robe of flame,
It is only so from the top of your towers.
When we go down, everything metamorphoses,
Everything sags and dies, nothing grandiose anymore,
Nothing left, except you, whom we always admire.

For the angels of heaven, with the reflection of their wings,
Gild the solemn shadows of your black walls,
And the Lord dwells in you.
World of poetry, in this world of prose,
At the sight of you, we feel something beating in our heart;
We are pious and full of faith!

In the caresses of the evening, whose gold damascenes you,
When you shine in the depths of your petty place,
Like an immense monstrance under a purple canopy;
Looking at this sublime spectacle from below,
We believe that between your tricks, by a sudden miracle,
In the holy triangle God will be seen.

As our bourgeois monuments
become small before your Gallic majesty,
Gigantic sister of Babel,
Near you, all up there, no dome, no needle,
The proudest peaks go only to your ankle,
And, your old leader collides with the sky.

Who could prefer, in his pedantic taste,
To the serious and straight folds of your Dantesque dress,
These poor Greek orders which are dying of cold,
These bastard pantheons, copied in the school,
Antique thrift store borrowed from Vignole,
And, none of which outside can't stand up straight.

O you! masons of the century, atheist architects,
Brains, thrown into a uniform mold,
People of the ruler and the compass;
Build boudoirs for stockbrokers,
And plaster huts for men of mire;
But houses for God, no!

Among the new palaces, the profane porticos,
The coquettish parthenons, courtesan churches,
With their Greek pediments on their Latin pillars,
The shameless houses of the pagan city;
It seems, to see you, Our Christian Lady,
A chaste matron in the middle of whores!






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