Sundays

 Autumn! It is autumn! Once again autumn!
 The great gale and all its trail
 Of reprisals, and of music . . .
 It is “Closed for the Season” at seaside hotels.
 Leaf-fall, fall of Antigones and Philomels:
 My gravedigger, Alas poor Yorick!
 Lumps them pell-mell.

 Love and straw-fires for ever!

 The good young ladies
 Inviolable and frail
 File soberly this way
 Summoned by the chapel-bell
 Hygienically and most dulcetly
 As befits the “sweet” Sabbath-day.

 How all around them grows purified
 And Sundayfied.

 And how faces all grow long at the sight of them!
 As for me, though: I am the Great White Bear,
 Brought hither by iceberg ferry,
 More polar, more spotless pure
 Than those girls in white millinery;
 Not, though, what you would call a churchgoer.
 I am the Grand Master of Analysis;
 Remember this.

 And yet . . . and yet . . . why so pale?
 Come, trust your old friend, you can tell me the tale.

 Ah no? Can such things be?
 I turn my face to the seas and the rough skies,
 To all things that grumble and that utter sighs.

 Such things! Such things!
 Matter for sleepless nights and nail-bitings.

 Poor, poor, for all their promisings!

 And we! Drowned in such seas,
 Plunged into such wonderment,
 Fallen to our knees . . . !

 O wonder, found and at once hidden,
 So martyred, poor, yet full of passion,
 Being, as it were, a thing forbidden
 Never to be touched, save in dream fashion.

 Wondrous thing,
 Most violet attar, precious residue,
 The universe
 Has care of you
 And planets in their courses are your nurse
 From burying to marrying.

 Oh, it is rich not to be bought!
 Just your dear eyes, there, in the skies –
 Greater than God, higher than thought,
 Those thoughtless and thought-coloured eyes!

 So frail, so thin!
 And all that mortal warmth
 Hoarded within!

 O forgive her, if, unthinking
 (How well it becomes her!)
 She makes eyes a little
 To beg you a little
 To have pity a little!

 O frail, frail, and still athirst
 For those Masses which I so mock!
 Bend, bend your dear head; O look,
 The spring-time, the lilac-burst.
 I was not thinking, I swear, of lovemakings
 But of heavenly things!

 O if, after morning Mass,
 We could but vanish and be no more
 – Being sick of the human race,
 So well-contented, so crass,
 There, at the church-door

- Jules Laforgue
(translated by P. N. Furbank)