Explore "Paroles Sans Musique" by Frederic Manning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
FOR JELLY D'ARANYI
Ah, the night! The eyes!
You are white beneath the plum-blossoms, / As an oread beneath the shadow / Of flowering branches: immobile, / Among things fugitive and frail.
For God hath filled you with the memory / Of things forgotten by man; and your eyelids / Close upon lost splendours.
Yea! They are heavy with the secrets of time; / Troubled by the strangeness of beauty.
But mine heart knoweth the secret / Of your subtile lips and eyes: the silence / Wherein throng presently, with maddening cymbals, / With bright-tressed torches, the maenads, / Their cool flesh wreathed with dark vines.
Ah, the night! The eyes!
Honey pale are you, pallid as ivory: / An amber grape, whose sweetness will be wine / On some king's lip!
Here 'mid these golds and purples, / These dusked magnificences, / Amid strange faces / Only your face against the plum-blossom / Know I: remembering / Bright spear heads in the moonlight / By the still tents, the red embers, / The strings and flutes of pain.
And again the weariness of desiring.
Ah, the night! The eyes!