Au platane. To a Plane-Tree

TO A PLANE TREE

For André Fontainas.

YOU bow down, great Plane-tree, and propose yourself nude, White as a young Scythian, But naively you catch, and your foot is restrained By your immobile site.

Reverberant shadow in which the same skies That carry you, are appeased, The dark mother constraining the pure-born foot Weighed by the mire down.

The winds do not want your adventuring brow; The tender and sombre earth, O Plane-tree, will never permit you one step To scandalise your shadow!

That brow can but access those luminous rungs Which your sap exalts you to; You may grow, naively, but not shatter the bonds Of an eternal halt!

Feel all around you other living things bound By this ancient hydra; Your equals are numerous, the poplars and pines, The ilyx and the maple,

Who, seized by the dead, their wild tousled feet held In this muddle of ashes, Sense the fading of flowers, and their semen thus winged Light in the air descending.

The aspen, the hornbeam, and the beech-tree formed In the shape of four young women, Keep ceaselessly battering a sky always closed, Their branching oars dressed in vain.

They live separate lives, but their tears are conjoined In the one lonely absence, And their silvery limbs are but vainly cut through At the sweet moment of birth.

When the soul in the evening is slowly breathed out Mounting to Aphrodite, The virgin in shadows must, in silence, sit, Hot all over with shame.

She feels herself caught out, and pale, and a part Of this so tender portent Which the flesh of today to the future turns With a youthful countenance...

But you, of arms purer than animal arms You who plunge them in the gold, You who form from the day the phantom of evils That sleep makes into dreams,

High profusion of leaves, agitation so proud When the bitter northern Sounds, at your golden heights, the young wintry skies On your harps, o Plane-tree,

Dare to moan!... It must, o supple flesh of wood, Make you twist, untwist yourself, Complain but not break, restore to the winds the voice They seek out in disorder!

Flagellate yourself!... Be like the impatient martyr Who is by his own self flayed, And dispute with the flames powerless to depart Their own return to the torch!

So that a hymn might rise to birds as yet unborn, And that the pure of soul May make tremble with hope the leaves of a trunk That is dreaming of the flame,

I have chosen you, powerful presence of the park, Made drunken by your tossing, Since the sky teaches you, and urges you, o great bow, To give it back a language!

O amorously rival to the Dryads of old, The poet alone is fit To stroke your burnished side as he would stroke the Horse On the ambitious flank!...

- No, says the tree. It says: No! by the glittering Of its magnificent head, Which the tempest treats just as universally As it does a blade of grass!