I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, to your whole soul, my soul, with its tears and its smiles and its kiss.
See, the dawn whitens the ground that is the colour of lees of wine; shadowy bonds seem to slip and glide away with melancholy; the water of the ponds grows bright and sifts its noise; the grass glitters and the flowers open, and the golden woods free themselves from the night.
Oh! what if we could one day enter thus into the full light; oh, what if we could one day, with conquering cries and lofty prayers, with no more veils upon us and no more remorse in us, oh! what if we could one day enter together into lucid love.
I drown my entire soul in your two eyes, and the mad rapture of that frenzied soul, so that, having been steeped in their gentleness and prayer, it may be returned to me brighter and of truer temper.
O for a union that refines the being, as two golden windows in the same apse cross their differently lucent fires and interpenetrate!
I am sometimes so heavy, so weary of being one who cannot be perfect, as he would! My heart struggles with its desires, my heart whose evil weeds, between the rocks of stubbornness, rear slyly their inky or burning flowers;
My heart, so false, so true, as the day may be, my contradictory heart, my heart ever exaggerated with immense joy or with criminal fear.
To love with our eyes, let us lave our gaze of the gaze of those whose glances we have crossed, by thousands, in life that is evil and enthralled.
The dawn is of flowers and dew and the mildest sifted light; soft plumes of silver and sun seem through the mists to brush and caress the mosses in the garden.
Our blue and marvellous ponds quiver and come to life with shimmering gold; emerald wings pass under the trees; and the brightness sweeps from the roads, the garths and the hedges the damp ashen fog in which the twilight still lingers.
In the garden of our love, summer still goes on: yonder, a golden peacock crosses an avenue; petals--pearls, emeralds, turquoises --deck the uniform slumber of the green swards.
Our blue ponds shimmer, covered with the white kiss of the snowy water-lilies; in the quincunxes, our currant bushes follow one another in procession; an iridescent insect teases the heart of a flower; the marvellous undergrowths are veined with gleams; and, like light bubbles, a thousand bees quiver along the arbours over the silver grapes.