Ruben Dario
Vultures a-wing have sullied the glory of the sky;
The winds bear on their pinions the horror of Death's
cry;
Assassinating one another, men rage and fall and die.
Has Antichrist arisen whom John at Patmos saw?
Portents are seen and marvels that fill the world with awe,
And Christ's return seems pressing, come to fulfill the Law.
The ancient Earth is pregnant with so profound a smart,
The royal dreamer, musing, silent and sad apart,
Grieves with the heavy anguish that rends the world's great
heart.
Slaughterers of ideals with the violence of fate
Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate
To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate.
Lord Christ! for what art waiting to come in all Thy might
And stretch Thy hands of radiance over these wolves of
night,
And spread on high Thy banners and lave the world with
light?
Swiftly arise and pour Life's essence lavishly
On souls that crazed with hunger, or sad, or maddened be,
Who tread the paths of blindness forgetting the dawn
and Thee.
Come Lord, to make Thy glory, with lightnings on Thy
Brow!
With trembling stars around Thee and cataclysmal woe,
And bring Thy gifts of justice and peace and love below!
Let the dread horse John visioned devouring stars, pass by;
And angels sound the clarion of Judgment from on high.
My heart shall be an ember and in thy censer lie
I found upon the shore a golden shell,
Massive, and with the daintiest pearls embossed;
Europa touched it with her hands divine
When on the heavenly bull the sea she crossed.
I lifted to my lips the sounding shell,
And woke the morning drum-beats of the sea;
I held it to mine ear, the azure mines
Of hidden treasure murmured low to me.
Thus comes to me the salt of those keen gales
The Argo felt within her swelling sails
When Jason's dream the stars of heaven loved well;
An unknown voice 'mid wave-sounds there I find,
A deep sea-swell and a mysterious wind.
(Shaped like a heart it is, that sounding shell).
In the pale afternoon the clouds go by
Aimlessly roving in the quiet sky.
His head between his hands, the dreamer weaves
His dream of clouds and Autumn-colored leaves.
Ah, his intimate sorrow, his long sighs,
And the glad radiance that has dimmed his eyes!
And all the tender glances, the blond tresses,
The rose hands over-brimming with caresses,
The sudden faces smiling everywhere
In the gold-dusted curtains of the air!
In the pale afternoon
A friendly faerie maiden comes to me
And tells me tales of many a secret thing
Fraught with the spell and music of the moon,
And I have learned what wonder the birds sing,
And what the breezes bring over the sea,
All that lies hidden in the mist or gleams,
A fleeting presence, in a young girl's dreams.
And once the thirst of infinite desire
Possessed me like a fever, and I said,
'I want to feel all radiance, fragrance, fire
And joy of life within me, to inspire
My soul forever!' And the faerie maid
Called me to follow her, and when he spoke
It was as if a harp to the soft stroke
Of loving hands had wakened suddenly:
She syllabled hope's language, calling me.
Oh, thirst for the idea! From the height
Of a great mountain forested with night
She showed me all the stars and told their names;
It was a golden garden wherein grows
The fleur-de-lys of heaven, leaved with flames.
And I cried, 'More!' and then the dawn arose.
The dawn came blushing; on her forehead beamed
Delicate splendor, and to me it seemed
A girl that, opening her casement, sees
Her lover watching her, and with surprise
Reddens but cannot hide her from his eyes.
And I cried, 'More!' The faerie maiden smiled
And called the flowers, and the flowers were
Lovely and fresh and moist with essences, -
The virgin rose that in the woods grows wild,
The gentle lily tall and shy and fair,
The daisy glad and timid as a child,
Poppies and marigolds, and all the rare
Blossoms that freight with dreams the evening air.
But I cried, 'More!' And then the winds brushed by
Bearing the laughter of the world, the cry
Of all glad lovers in the woods of Spring,
And echoes, and all pleasant murmuring
Of rustling leaf or southward-flying bird,
Unworded songs and musics never heard.
The faerie maiden, smiling, led me where
The sky is stretched over the world, above
Our heights and depths of hoping and despair,
Beyond the reach of singing and of love.
And then the tore the veil. And I say there
That all was dawn. And in the deeps there
A woman's Face radiant exceedingly.-
Ah, never, Muses, never could ye say
The holy joyance that enkindled me!-
'More?
' said the faerie in her laughing way;
But I saw the Face only. And I dreamed.
Only the Swans that day
Saw the high maker of our thoughts embark
And on the Lake Mysterious fade away
In the black ship that crosses to the dark.
The poet's robe was his,
Embroidered with illustrious fleurs-de-lys;
And laurel leaf and thorn
His sad prefigured forehead did adorn.
Afar God's City rose,
Where everlasting Peace her throne has reared
Above the poppy-meadows of repose;
And as the coat of his desire he neared,
He proved divine delight, knew grace untold,
Beheld the Cross uplifted and, before
That sacred Conqueror,
The fallen Sphinx, a corpse already cold.
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how
My heart's celestial histories,
So countless were, could not be told.-
She was a tender child, in this
World of affliction manifold.
She seemed a dawn of pure delight;
She smiled as the flowers after rain;
Her tresses were like to the night
Fashioned of darknesses and pain.
I was timid and childlike shy.
I could not but have been this way:
She, to my love chaste as the sky,
Was Herodias and Salomé
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how
The other was more sensitive,
More quieting and loving-kind,
With greater will to love and live
Than I ever had hoped to find.
For with her grace of tenderness
A violence of love she had:
In a peplos of loveliness
Was hid a Maenad passion mad
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Wilted in me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how
Another fancied my lips were
A casket wrought to hold her love;
And wildly with the teeth of her
To gnaw my very heart she strove.
She willed all passionate excess;
She was a flame of love for me;
She made each ardorous caress
Synthesis of eternity.
She deemed our flesh a deathless thing,
And on desire an Eden reared,
Forgetting that the flowers of Spring
And of the flesh so soon are seared
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how
And the others! In many climes,
In so many lands, ever were
Merely the pretext for my rhymes,
Or heart-born fantasies of her.
I sought for the princess in vain,
She that awaited sorrowing.
But life is hard. Bitter with pain.
There is no princess now to sing!
And yet despite the season drear,
My thirst of love no slaking knows;
Gray-haired am I, yet still draw near
The roses of the garden-close
.
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how
Ah, but the golden Dawn is mine!
The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.
To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,
and the dread of having been, and future terrors...
And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,
and to suffer all through life and through the darkness,
and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...
And the flesh that temps us with bunches of cool grapes,
and the tomb that awaits us with its funeral sprays,
and not to know where we go,
nor whence we came!...
Silence of the night , a sad, nocturnal
silence--Why does my soul tremble so?
I hear the humming of my blood,
and a soft storm passes through my brain.
Insomnia! Not to be able to sleep, and yet
to dream. I am the autospecimen
of spiritual dissection, the auto-Hamlet!
To dilute my sadness
in the wine of the night
in the marvelous crystal of the dark--
And I ask myself: When will the dawn come?
Someone has closed a door--
Someone has walked past--
The clock has rung three--If only it were She!--
I know there are those who ask: Why does he not
sing with the same wild harmonies as before?
But they have not seen the labors of an hour
the work of a minute, the prodigies of a year.
I am an aged tree that, when I was growing.
uttered a vague, sweet sound when the breeze caressed me.
The time for youthful smiles has now passed by:
now, let the hurricane swirl my heart to song!
You that have heard the heartbeat of the night,
you that have heard, in the long, sleepless hours,
a closing door, the rumble of distant wheels,
a vague echo, a wandering sound from somewhere:
you, in the moments of mysterious silence,
when the forgotten ones issue from their prison--
in the hour of the dead, In the hour of repose--
will know how to read the bitterness in my verses.
I fill them, as one would fill a glass, with all
my grief for remote memories and black misfortunes,
the nostalgia of my flower-intoxicated soul
and the pain of a heart grown sorrowful with fętes;
with the burden of not being what I might have been,
the loss of the kingdom that was awaiting me,
the thought of the instant when I might not have been born
and the dream my life has been ever since I was!
All this has come in the midst of that boundless silence
in which the night develops earthly illusions,
and I feel as if an echo of the world's heart
had penetrated and disturbed my own.
Ox that I saw in my childhood, as you steamed
in the burning gold on the Nicaraguan sun,
there on the rich plantation filled with tropical
harmonies; woodland dove, of the woods that sang
with the sound of the wind, of axes, of birds and wild
bulls:
I salute you both, because you are both my life.
You, heavy ox, evoke the gentle dawn
that signaled it was time to milk the cow,
when my existence was all white and rose;
and you, sweet mountain dove, cooing and calling,
you signify all that my own springtime, now
so far away, possessed of the Divine Springtime.
I want to express my anguish in verses that speak
of my vanished youth, a time of dreams and roses,
and the bitter defloration of my life
by many small cares and one vast aching sorrow.
And the voyage to a dim orient in half-seen ships,
the seeds of prayer that flowered in blasphemies,
the bewilderment of a swan among the puddles,
the false nocturnal blue of a sick Bohemia.
Far-off harpsichord, silent and forgotten,
that never gave my dreams the sublime sonata;
orphan skiff, heraldic tree, dark nest
which the night made lovely with its silver light;
Hope still aromatic with fresh herbs; the trill
of the nightingale in the morning in the spring;
the white lily cut down by a fatal destiny;
the search for happiness, and evil's persecutions--
And the dismal amphora with its divine poison
that causes the inner torments of this life;
the fearful knowledge of our human mire;
and the horror of knowing that we are transitory,
the horror of walking blindly, among alarms,
toward the unknowable, toward the inevitable;
and the brute nightmares that rack our weeping sleep,
from which no one but She can wake us up!
