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Others—innocents or
else lymphaticals—
Find in the woods nothing but charms languorous,
Fresh breezes and warm perfumes. They are felicitous!
Others feel seized there—dreamers—by scares mystical.
They are felicitous! Me,
nervous, and whom a remorse
Appalling and vague affrights all intermission without,
Through forests I tremble after the manner of a coward
Who feared to fall in a trap or saw before him corpses.
Those great branches never
appeased, like the groundswell,
Whence falls a black silence with a shadow more
Black yet, all that dreary and sinister decor
Fills me with horror trivial and profound as well.
Especially evenings of
summer: the red of the setting sun
Fades into the grayish blue of mists it tinges
With conflagration and blood; and the angelus that rings
Distantly seems a plaintive cry approaching one.
The wind rises hot and heavy,
a shiver passes
And repasses, ever stronger, in the thickness
Ever darker of the lofty oaks, obsessive,
And disperses, like a miasma, into space.
Night comes on. The owl flies
off. It is the instant
When of naive grandmas' narratives one thinks—
Under a bush, yonder, yonder, living springs
Make a sound of assassins posted taking counsel.
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