Moonlight

by Paul Verlaine

Moonlight 

Your soul is like a painter's landscape where

charming masks in shepherd mummeries

are playing lutes and dancing with an air

of being sad in their fantastic guise.

Even while they sing, all in a minor key, 

of love triumphant and life's careless boon, 

they seem in doubt of their felicity, 

their song melts in the calm light of the moon, 

the lovely melancholy light that sets

the little birds to dreaming in the tree

and among the statues makes the jets

of slender fountains sob with ecstasy.

Poemes Saturniens 

The Sages of old time, well worth our own,

Believed--and it has been disproved by none--

That destinies in Heaven written are,

And every soul depends upon a star.

(Many have mocked, without remembering

That laughter oft is a misguiding thing,

This explanation of night's mystery.)

Now all that born beneath Saturnus be,--

Red planet, to the necromancer dear,--

Inherit, ancient magic-books make clear,

Good share of spleen, good share of wretchedness.

Imagination, wakeful, vigorless,

In them makes the resolves of reason vain.

The blood within them, subtle as a bane,

Burning as lava, scarce, flows ever fraught

With sad ideals that ever come to naught.

Such must Saturnians suffer, such must die,--

If so that death destruction doth imply,--

Their lives being ordered in this dismal sense

By logic of a malign Influence. 

L'Amour Par Terre

The wind the other night blew down the Love

That in the dimmest corner of the park

So subtly used to smile, bending his arc,

And sight of whom did us so deeply move

One day! The other night's wind blew him down!

The marble dust whirls in the morning breeze.

Oh, sad to view, o'erblotted by the trees,

There on the base, the name of great renown!

Oh, sad to view the empty pedestal!

And melancholy fancies come and go

Across my dream, whereon a day of woe

Foreshadowed is-I know what will befall!

Oh, sad!-And you are saddened also, Sweet,

Are not you, by this scene? although your eye

Pursues the gold and purple butterfly

That flutters o'er the wreck strewn at our feet.