O seasons, O castles,What soul is without flaws?All its lore is known to me,Felicity, it enchants us all.
À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
L’aube exalteé ainsi qu’un peuple de colombes, et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir!(And dawn, exalted like a host of doves – and then I’ve seen what men believe they’ve seen!)
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:From time to time my heart is like some oakWhose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.
But the problem is to make the soul into a monster
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
The same bourgeois magic everywhere the mail train sets you down.
They find me odd, and whisper behind hands…And my brutal desires sink hooks into their lips…
No one’s serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades
My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
Blood was flowing – in Bluebeard’s house, in the abattoirs, in the circuses where God had set his seal to whiten the windows. Blood and Milk flowed together.
I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.