La Pythie. The Prophetess

THE PROPHETESS

To Pierre Louÿs.

Haec effata silet; pallor simul occupat ora. VIRGIL, AEN., IV.

THE Prophetess breathing out flame From nostrils toughened by incense, Drunkenly, gasping, shrieks!... the soul Fearful, and the sides bellowing! Pale, bitten to the very depth, And the eye rolled up till it hangs At the highest point of horror, The look which has emptied her mask Is wrenched living from the basin, From the smoke-fumes, from the frenzy!

On the wall, her crazy shadow Where a major demon holds sway, Amongst the odorous tumult Lavishes a phantom swimmer, Whose ecstasy made gigantic, Breaking the calmness of the room, If her mad bray tardily comes, Will mimic her dark possession, Hasten the gods, force the spasms To a future consummation!

The martyr in an icy sweat, Her fingers clutching at themselves, Rages atop the shaking frame Of a snake-encircled tripod: - Ah! cursed!... What evil I suffer! My whole nature is an abyss! Alas! Half-open to spirits, I have lost my own mystery!... Adulterous Intelligence Controls a body that it knows!

Cruel gift! Tainted Master, cease Quick, quick, O heavenly ferment, To feign a futile pregnancy In this womb without a lover! Make an end to this ghastly scene! See my whole body's obscene bow Drawn back to breaking point to shoot, As its arrow most infamous, Implacably skyward the soul Which my breast can no more contain!

Who speaks to me, as in my stead? What echo answers me: You lie! Who enlightens me?... Who blasphemes? And who, with these slavering words, Whose sharp fragments rip at my tongue, Makes it loosen such an harangue To quell the spiteful lisping cries Which chew and plot the disorder Of a mouth that wants to bite back And emend its on confessions?

God! I know in myself no crime But that of having scarcely lived!... But if you take me for victim On a vanquished body's altar Where you stretch out a monster, kill This monster, and the beast laid low, The neck cut through, the head produced By hairs that drag at the temples, Permit this feeblest of lamps To strike the whole night to marble!

All right then, by this wandering Lifeless, stray, and unending moon, May seas be suspended, the wave Maintained at its eternal crest! That humans be made like statues, The hearts frozen, the souls destroyed, And by my petrifying glance, Let a multitude of their words Harden in a crowd of idols Mute with foolishness and with pride!

But! What!... To become the viper Whose undulating motive force Takes by surprise flesh which despairs Of its multitude of sections!... To resume a senseless struggle!... Far rather then turn back your thought To joy that is fled, and return, O memory, to that magic Which did not draw its energy From other mysteries than yours!

My dear body... Preferent form, Its coolness one which never could Quench the thirst of Aphrodite, Darkness intact, tender summits, Your inexpressible divides Of clay into sentient isles, Soft substance of my destiny, In what agreement we once lived, Before the gift born of the foam Had made of you this corpselike thing!

You, my shoulder, where gold makes play Within a fountain's blackest depths, I loved to put my cheek to you Melting into its softest self!... Or, to my nostrils lifted up, Opening on far distant seas, The hands full of their living breasts, Between the fair curve of my arms My abyss drank from the immense Profoundness offered by the winds!

Alas! O roses, every lyre Contains its own modulation! One night, in sad delirium My constellation came in view! The temple is changed to the cave, And the storm of dreams comes between The same sky which had been so fair! I must groan, am forced to attain I know not what ecstasy, bind My hair with a fragment of cloth!

They have my blue stigmata known Appearing on my meagre skin; They dulled my senses with their herbs Woolly as a flock of sheep; They have, for a live amulet, Touched the flesh of my heaving breast Under its snakelike ornaments; Dizzy, drunk upon acrid fumes, They have, to the murmur of neumes, Subterranean honours paid.

What have I done to be condemned Pure, to these odious rites? The sombre carcass of an ass Would serve the gods as well for hive! But a virgin consecrated, A conch-shell nacreous and new Owing to the divinity Only silence and sacrifice, And that intimate violence Which virginity does itself!

Why then, Creatrix Powerful, Author of living mysteries, In this virgin for a matrix, Sow the marvels of wickedness! Are these the gifts you give to me? Think you, that when the cord is snapped Sounds gush forth more beautifully? Your plectrum has my body struck, But you leave it with no more force Than that which sounds from out a tomb!

Be clement, without oracles! Employ the magic of your hands, Made caresses by miracles, Take back the superhuman gifts! In vain do you communicate To our feeble stems, these unique Upheavals which your splendour shows! Calm waters more transparent are Than any storm's relationship With the confusion of the deeps!

Enough, the light of the divine Is not the dreadful lightning-flash Which forestalls us and seeks us out As does a dream's cruel clarity! It shines forth!... Us it will instruct!... No!... Solitude comes but to gleam In the immense wound of the air Where no pallid architecture, But an agonising rupture Imprints on us pure deserts!

Do not then, universal hands, Draw from out my thunderous brow Some scintillating sparks supreme! These are the same games fortune plays! The past, the future are brothers And in their contrasting faces A single head turns pale to see Wherever it looks nothing more Than the same wild absence of isles More lovely than forgetfulness.

Dark witnesses of so much light Do not seek more... Weep then, my eyes!... O tears which spring from a first cause Too deeply in the heavens set!... Never a bitterer demand!... But the eye which is the strongest Must on darkness nourish itself!... Maintaining thus our race dismayed, The hopelessness of distances Gives us sufficient time to die!

Listen, my soul, hear these rivers! What cavernous grottoes are here? Is it my blood?... Are they the fresh Murmuring of merciless waves? My secrets herald their new dawns! Sad bronzes, my sounding temples, What say you of the coming time! Strike down, strike down, from out the rock, Abolish the hour most near... My two natures will soon be one!

O formidably ascended, And on such terrifying rungs, I sense in the tree of my life The death climbing up from my heels! Along my whole shivering thread, The moist finger of the spinner Traces out an atrocious will! And sob by sob the crisis mounts Even to my nape where it breaks A peak of voluptuousness!

Ah! shatter the living portals! Demolish all the useless seals, Thick flock of appalling terrors, Bristling with incandescent sparks! Arise from the mournful stables Where my blacknesses nurtured you With their fabulous abundance! Rise up, on dreams too over gorged, O thorny and so fuzzy hoard, And come to fume in the gold, Fleece!

So that, always more tormented, Her wits astray, with groan and howl The prophetess has been stirred up By the breath of the molten gold. But at last heaven intervenes! The ear of the smiling pontiff Makes venture into the future: An holy expectation leans, And a voice that is white and new Escapes the impure body.

Honour of Men, Holy LANGUAGE, Speech prophetic and remedy, Beautiful chains accepted by The god straying into the flesh, Inspiration, generousness! Here speaking then is Wisdom's self And sounding this majestic Voice Which when it sounds is recognised To be no more a human voice So much as the waves and the woods!