XXXII Ballades in Blue China [1885]

And seem to say – Vos plaudite!

    A. D.

VERSES AND TRANSLATIONS

Oronte —Ce ne sont point de ces grands vers pompeux,

Mais de petits vers!

    “Le Misanthrope,” Acte i., Sc. 2.

A PORTRAIT OF 1783

Your hair and chin are like the hair
And chin Burne-Jones’s ladies wear;
You were unfashionably fair
In ’83;
And sad you were when girls are gay,
You read a book about Le vrai
Mérite de l’homme, alone in May.
What can it be,
Le vrai mérite de l’homme?  Not gold,
Not titles that are bought and sold,
Not wit that flashes and is cold,
But Virtue merely!
Instructed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(And Jean-Jacques, surely, ought to know),
You bade the crowd of foplings go,
You glanced severely,
Dreaming beneath the spreading shade
Of ‘that vast hat the Graces made;’ [4 - Vous y verrez, belle Julie,Que ce chapeau tout maltraitéFut, dans un instant de folie,Par les Grâces même inventé.‘À Julie.’ Essais en Prose et en Vers, par Joseph Lisle; Paris. An. V. de la République.]
So Rouget sang – while yet he played
With courtly rhyme,
And hymned great Doisi’s red perruque,
And Nice’s eyes, and Zulmé’s look,
And dead canaries, ere he shook
The sultry time
With strains like thunder.  Loud and low
Methinks I hear the murmur grow,
The tramp of men that come and go
With fire and sword.
They war against the quick and dead,
Their flying feet are dashed with red,
As theirs the vintaging that tread
Before the Lord.
O head unfashionably fair,
What end was thine, for all thy care?
We only see thee dreaming there:
We cannot see
The breaking of thy vision, when
The Rights of Man were lords of men,
When virtue won her own again
In ’93.

THE MOON’S MINION

(FROM THE PROSE OF C. BAUDELAIRE.)

Thine eyes are like the sea, my dear,
The wand’ring waters, green and grey;
Thine eyes are wonderful and clear,
And deep, and deadly, even as they;
The spirit of the changeful sea
Informs thine eyes at night and noon,
She sways the tides, and the heart of thee,
The mystic, sad, capricious Moon!

The Moon came down the shining stair
Of clouds that fleck the summer sky,
She kissed thee, saying, “Child, be fair,
And madden men’s hearts, even as I;
Thou shalt love all things strange and sweet,
That know me and are known of me;
The lover thou shalt never meet,
The land where thou shalt never be!”

She held thee in her chill embrace,
She kissed thee with cold lips divine,
She left her pallor on thy face,
That mystic ivory face of thine;
And now I sit beside thy feet,
And all my heart is far from thee,
Dreaming of her I shall not meet,
And of the land I shall not see!

IN ITHACA

“And now am I greatly repenting that ever I left my life with thee, and the immortality thou didst promise me.” —Letter of Odysseus to Calypso. Luciani Vera Historia.

’Tis thought Odysseus when the strife was o’er
With all the waves and wars, a weary while,
Grew restless in his disenchanted isle,
And still would watch the sunset, from the shore,
Go down the ways of gold, and evermore
His sad heart followed after, mile on mile,
Back to the Goddess of the magic wile,
Calypso, and the love that was of yore.

Thou too, thy haven gained, must turn thee yet