The boredom of having to live with people and amid things

Many times makes my face morose and what it sings.

But to have a conscience and care in such a pass

Full wears out my sadness, ennobles my alas.

So my discourse warbles and my eyes with grins

Wherein certitude divine at last begins,

And patience all divine dispenses me salt words

In my good long counsel for the universe.

For it’s not entirely an effect of age

I have my moments when I am a kind of sage,

Almost a sage without underlining it or shame,

Spreading round me some good and getting some ill-fame.

Now, anyway this life and its problem drear

Sometimes makes my speech dull and my forehead blear.

Out of these temptations I save myself anew

In moralities to my own level due;

And that’s a sort of test methodical and severe,

God who tries the reins! that I consider me here,

Scruting my least wrongs and to the very dregs,

Like a judge his prisoners on their last legs,

To this point I bring my humor of being scrupulous

Such that people often say I am ridiculous.

Who cares! at such times, is it humility?

I feel blesséd with some form of charity,

Some loyalty, to talk as lowly men do curt,

Some charity again I say—Madness in short!

We are nothing. God is all. God made us,

God saves us. There it is! Here’s my throw of dice:

Pray as stubborn men. Go drown in prayer,

It’s only steeping in that mighty river there,

It shapes you into the most ideal of instruments

To fight down all evil and curb the elements.

Pray as men on fire. Stay always in prayer,

It arms you for attack and guards your derriere.

So as to be gentle and firm with everyone

Just as you would have it to yourselves be done.

We’re saved by prayer once it has brought us back to life,

It is the certain pledge and the word that ends all strife.

It’s the angel and the lady, the big sister

Full of love severe and soft as gold its glister.

Prayer has feet as lightsome as a pair of wings;

And wings so that its feet take off like flying things;

Prayer is quite sagacious too; it thinks, it sees,

Scrutes, interrogates, doubts, examines, at last believes.

It can never deny, being par excellence

Salutary fear and effort made in silence.

It is universal and sobs or else it smiles,

Flies away with genius and with the mind runs miles.

It’s esoteric or it stammers childishly;

Its mother tongue is Greek or Latin indifferently,

Or vulgar, or patois, slang if so it must!

For, often, the lower it be, the better it’s discussed.

I tell myself all that, and would for all I’m worth:

O Lord, grant unto me to raise me from the Earth

In the humble vow alone can make a child

Move within your will before and eke behind.

Such action whatsoever at such time of my life

And that this action whatsoever be followed rife

With a complete abandonment in you who formulate

The simplest and the most punctual postulate,

Just for the necessity quotidian,

While awaiting, endlessly, my death as a Christian.

Paul Verlaine