The Philosopher and the “Young Fate”

The Young Fate, of a day, found her Philosopher:

“Ah, she said, of what matter soever

Shall I know myself construct...

On more than one I produce the effect

Of a person quite obscure;

Every mortal with no care

To think nor go more deep,

At the name I bear has taken quick a leap.

When it isn’t pity, I excite such hates,

And among the better minds,

If there’s one me tolerates,

Each other him in error finds.

These people say needs must no muse shall ever cause

Any more trouble than a rose!

Whoever breathes it has pure pleasure.

But loves are evermore most precious

That long labor of soul and of desire

Brings unto their ends delicious.

To hearts profound it will not do

To find a face, and kisses too,

So that one flies most keenly to a brief adventure...

No!... The truly dear object bedecks itself with our torments,

Your tearful eyes behold it all in diamonds,

The bitter nighttide makes of it a lovely picture.

That is why I guard myself and my charming secrets.

My heart would I be forced, and you refuse, Sweethearts

Who are put off by the very knots of my beautiful cincture.

My Father has commanded: I belong to effort.

My darkness makes me yet the mistress of my lot,

And gives up at last but to the happy little band

This innocent ME who trembles at her own shadow

Whileas Love makes her very knees to shake so, too.

CERTES, of great desire I was the work all anxious...

But I am not in myself any more mysterious

Than the simplemost among you...

Mortals, you are flesh, rememoration, presage;

You were once; you shall be; you carry such a visage:

You are all; you are naught,

Bulwarks of the world and reeds the air sunders,

You are ALIVE... What a wonder!...

A mystery is all your lot,

And that arcanum in you at my own is astonished?

What would you be, if not mysterious?

A bit of dream upon the earth,

A bit of love, hunger, thirst, taking steps

Of which not one can outwit death,

And you would have a share in animals’ pure fates

Had the Gods not placed, like a mighty spring,

Most intimately in your pates,

The great gift of having of your fate no understanding.

“Who am I” speaks the living man to day on waking

And whom sunlight is redressing;

“Where am I going?” gives out the mind on the altar of dreaming,

When nighttime gathers it unto its own marveling.

The cleverest of all receives the bee-sting,

In the soul of the least of men a serpent gnaws itself;

Even a fool is adorned with his enigmas by death

That lays him out and drapes him as a person grave,

Frozen with a secret such to long enslave.

GO!... If all was clear, all would seem in vain!

Your boredom would people a universe that has no shade

With an impassible life of souls without their leaven.

But some inquietude is a present divine.

Your eyes’ bright hope upon a threshold darkling made

Finds no repose upon a world that is too sure;

The principle of all your grandeurs is obscure.

The deepest of all humans, unknown of themselves,

From a certain night supreme blessings delve

And the pure objects of our loves’ noble ways.

A shadowladen treasure makes the brilliance of your days:

A silence is of poems their strange and strangemost well.

Know you then within you the deep of all my essay:

From you yourselves I’ve drawn the shadow that you feel.

Who wanders in himself at once knows all my weal.

In the dark of life where sight itself is lost,

Time is working, death coils,

A Fate aside dreams it tossed.

It’s ME... Try withal to love this one young rebel:

“I am black, yet beautiful”

As the Beloved sings, in the Canticle of the King.

And if I inspire dreading,

Poem that I am, to him who cannot read,

What more prompt than to close up the screed?

That’s the way that one is freed

From writings so clear one finds therein else not one thing.

Paul Valéry