L'amateur de poèmes. The poetry lover

THE LOVER OF POEMS

IF I suddenly look at my real thought, I am not consoled with having to subject myself to this interior word without being and without origin; these ephemeral figures; and this infinity of enterprises interrupted by their own facility, which transform themselves the one into the other, except that nothing is changed with them. Incoherent without its appearance, as instantaneously non-existent as it is spontaneous, thought, by its very nature, lacks style.

BUT I have not the power all day every day to offer to my attention a few necessary beings, nor to feign the spiritual obstacles which establish an appearance of commencement, of fullness and of finish, in place of my insupportable flight.

A poem is a duration, during which, reader, I breathe in time with a pre-established law; I give my breath and the machinery of my voice; or only their power, which reconciles itself with the silence.

I abandon myself to the adorable allure: interpret, live where the words take me. Their appearance is written down. Their sonorities organised. Their disturbance itself composed, after a prior meditation, and they will rush together themselves in groups magnificent or pure, in their resonance. Even my astonishments are assured: they are hidden in advance, and become a part of numbers.

MOVED by the fatal handwriting, and if the always future metre links together my memory without return, I experience each word in all its force, for having been indefinitely awaited. This measure which carries me and which I colour, guards me from true and from false. Neither doubt nor my division, neither reason nor my distraction. No hazard, but an extraordinary chance fortifies. I find without effort the language and this source of happiness; and I think by artifice, a thought quite certain, marvellously provident, - with the gaps calculated, without involuntary obscurities, whose movement orders me and whose quantity fulfils me: a thought singularly completed.