Month: November 2019

Gérard de Nerval – El Desdichado (1853)
El Deschidado

I am the man of gloom – widowed – unconsoled
The prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruin:
My sole star is dead – and my constellated lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.

In the night of the tomb, you, my consolation,
Give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea,
The flower that so eased my heart’s desolation,
And the trellis that twines the rose into the vine.

Am I Eros or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron?
My brow is still red with the kiss of the queen;
I have dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims. . .

And, twice victorious, I have crossed Acheron:
My Orphic lyre in turn modulating the strains
Of the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.

trans. Richard Sieburth.

And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of blackest hue:
In vain with cymbals’ ring
They call the grisly king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue.
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.

Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove or green,
Trampling the unshower’d grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud:
In vain with timbrel’d anthems dark
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipp’d ark.

from On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity. {John Milton}

The work of maestros, read either by Tom O’Bedlam, or the poets themselves.

Addendum: John Gielgud chimes in with some Percy B Shelley, as does Bryan Cranston, and Milton is presented on the page. As is Nerval, for that matter. And then/now, some tributes:

Rosie: What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

     Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

          We will grieve not, rather find

          Strength in what remains behind…

{Wordsworth}

Sparky: Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

          Thy soul’s immensity;

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind…

{Wordsworth}

Piglet: Beyond that, he has roused us, among thoughts of universe or universes and of our smallness in the majestic vague, to the awareness of “our private immensity” in the presence of those particles of which there are always more and more, and of which we are finally constructed…

{Gustav E}