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Letter To Sainte-Beuve

On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
under the four-square heaven of solitude,
where a child drinks study’s tart ten-year brew.
It was in those days, outstanding and memorable,
when the teachers, forced to loosen our classical
fetters, yet all still hostile to your rhyming,
succumbed to the pressure of our mad duelling,
and allowed a triumphant, mutinous, pupil
to make Triboulet howl in Latin, at will.
Which of us in those days of pale adolescence
didn’t share the weary torpor of confinement,
- eyes lost in the dreary blue of a summer sky
or the snowfall’s whiteness, we were dazzled by,
ears pricked, eager, waiting – a pack of hounds
drinking some book’s far echo, a riot’s sound?
Most of all in summer, that melted the leads,
the walls, high, blackened, filled with dread,
with the scorching heat, or when autumn haze
lit the sky with its one monotonous blaze
and made the screeching falcons fall asleep,
white pigeons’ terrors, in their slender keep:
the season of reverie when the Muse clings
through the endless day to some bell that rings:
when Melancholy at noon when all is drowsing
at the corridor’s end, chin in hand, dragging –
eyes bluer and darker than Diderot’s Nun,
that sad, obscene tale known to everyone,
– her feet weighed down by premature ennui,
her brow from night’s moist languor un-free.
– and unhealthy evenings, then, feverish nights,
that make young girls love their bodies outright,
and, sterile pleasure, gaze in their mirrors to see
the ripening fruits of their own nubility: –
Italian evenings of thoughtless lethargy,
when knowledge of false delights is revealed
when sombre Venus, on her high black balcony,
out of cool censers, waves of musk sets free.
In this war of enervating circumstances,
matured by your sonnets, prepared by your stanzas,
one evening, having sensed the soul of your art,
I transported Amaury’s story into my heart.
Every mystical void is but two steps away
from doubt. – The potion, drop by drop, day by day,
filtering through me, I ,drawn to the abyss since I
was fifteen, who swiftly deciphered René’s sigh,
I parched by some strange thirst for the unknown,
within the smallest of arteries, made its home.

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