Funeral Toast

O of our joyousness, you, the emblem fatal!

Hail of utter madness and libation pale,

Think not of the magical hope of the corridor

A golden horror pained in my void cup I offer!

Your apparition will not be enough for me:

For I have, myself, set you in porphyry.

Here the rite is for the hands to snuff the torch

Into the heavy iron of the tomb’s doors:

And one ignores ill, chosen for our feast

Quite simple of the poet’s absence to be singing,

That this fair monument enwraps him altogether.

Were it not the ardent glory of the métier

All the way to the vile and common hour of ash,

Through the windowpane lit by a thence proud dusk

Returns toward the fires of pure mortal sun!

Magnificent, total and solitary, such

Shivers to breathe forth the false pride that is human.

This haggard throng! it announces: All of you are

The sad opacity of the specters in your future.

But the blazon on vain walls of mournings strewn

I have scorned the lucid horror of a tear,

When, deaf even to my sacred verse not feared

By one of these passers, proud, blind and mute,

Of his sheer shroud the guest, who is self-transmuted

Into the virgin hero of the posthumous wait.

Vast gulf brought in the heaped-up pile of haze

By the irascible wind of words he hasn’t said,

Nothingness unto this man forever dead:

“Memoirs of horizons, what is, say you, the earth?”

Howls the dream; and, voice whose clarity gets worse,

Space has for a playtoy the shout: “I do not know!”

The Master, with a look profound, has, as he goes,

Appeased of Eden the unquiet wonderment

Of which the final shiver, in his voice only, wakens

For the Rose and Lily the mystery of a name.

Of this destiny does nothing then remain?

O all of you, abandon now a somber creed.

Splendid and eternal genius has no shade.

Concerned about your desire, I’d most willingly see,

To him who vanished, yesterday, in the duty

Ideal set us by that very star its gardens,

Survive unto the honor of the tranquil disaster

An agitation solemn and most solemn in the air

Of words, purple drunken and the high bright calyx,

That, diamond and rain, the diaphanous regard

Remaining upon these flowers that fade not on the sward,

Singles amidst the time and the daybeam out!

It’s the tour already of the real groves ours,

Where the pure poet has for labor humble and large

To proscribe dreaming, enemy of his charge:

So that when morning comes for his idleness haughty,

That hour when olden death is as it is for Gautier

To open not the sacred eyes and to be still,

Rises, tributary adornment of the hill,

The solid sepulcher where lies all that may benight,

Both avaricious soundlessness and massive night.

Stéphane Mallarmé