Great Throughts Treasury

"I am a soul longing to sit beside the bright hearth, and to be brought back to life; all I need is to hear from your lips the murmur of my name repeated throughout the night."

"I am alone in my monotonous country, while all those around me live in the idolatry of a mirror reflecting in its depths serene Herodiade, whose gaze is diamond keen... O final enchantment! yes, I sense it, I am alone."

"I can see my reflection like that of an angel! And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn, wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land where beauty flourishes."

"I feel in my sinews the spreading of shadows converging together with a shiver and in solitary vigil after flights triumphal my head rise from this scythe through a clean rupture that serves to dissever the ancient disharmony with the body as drunk from fasting it persists in following with a haggard bound its gaze profound up where the frozen absolute has chosen that nothing shall measure its vastness, O glacier but according to a ritual"

"I have finally begun my Herodiade. With terror, for I am inventing a language which must necessarily burst forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces. ? the line of poetry in such a case should be composed not of words, but of intentions, and all the words should fade away before the sensation.."

"I wait, but do not know for what or why or perhaps you are uttering the last bruised sighs, ignorant of the mystery and of your cries, of a childhood feeling its frozen gems being broken off at last amidst its dreams."

"I, proud of my rumor, for long I will talk of goddesses; and by picturings idolatrous,"

"If only I'd chosen an easy work! But, precisely, I, who am sterile and crepuscular, have chosen a terrifying subject, whose sensations, if they are strong, reach the point of atrocity, and if they are vague, have the strange attitude of mystery. And my Verse hurts me at times, and wounds me as if it were of iron! I have, moreover, found an intimate and unique way of painting and noting down the very fleeting impressions. I should add, which is even more terrifying, that all these impressions follow one another as in a symphony, and I often have entire days when I ask myself if this impression can accompany that one, what is their relationship and effect ? You can guess that I write few lines in a week."

"Illumined by the principle that chose my consecration it extends a salutation."

"In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch ? phosphorus ? flour ? bottles of water and alcohol ? and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that."

"In the labor of my patience, atlas, herbal, ritual."

"Inert, all burns in the fierce hour."

"It isn't ideas I'm short of... I've got too many (Degas on discussing poetry with Mallarme, who replied)'Degas, you can't make a poem with ideas-you make it with words."

"Magical shadow with symbolic powers! A voice from the distant past, an evocation, is it not mine prepared for incantation?"

"No more, I must sleep, forgetting the outrage, on the thirsty sand lying, and as I delight open my mouth to wine's potent star! Adieu, both! I shall see the shade you became."

"No water murmurs but what my flute pours on the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before it scatters the sound in a waterless shower, is, on the horizon's unwrinkled space, the visible serene artificial breath of inspiration, which regains the sky."

"No! My mouth cannot be sure of fully savoring its kisses unless your princely lover finally stifles his dreams of glory burying them like a diamond in the great mass of your hair."

"The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words."

"My breast, though proof-less, still attests a bite mysterious, due to some august tooth; but enough! for confidant such mystery chose the great double reed which one plays 'neath the blue."

"The sun as it's halted miraculously exalted resumes its descent Incandescent."

"O Spirit of litigation, know, when we keep silent in this season, the stem of multiple lilies grew too large to be contained by reason."

"Then shall I awake to the primitive fervor, straight and alone, 'neath antique floods of light, lilies and one of you all through my ingenuousness."

"These nymphs I would perpetuate. So clear their light carnation, that it floats in the air heavy with tufted slumbers. Was it a dream I loved?"

"We do not write poems with ideas, but with words."

"This was the glorious culmination of what I had longed for, those ideal flowers that I had sought, and my heart leaped within me to see the whole family of the flowers of the goddess Iris rise up in their turn at the prospect of my accepting the task of revealing their existence."

"When slowly we breathe it out"

"When the sad sun sinks, it shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks! No sunset, but the red awakening of the last day concluding everything struggles so sadly that time disappears, the redness of apocalypse, whose tears fall on the child, exiled to her own proud heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud for its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away from the plumage of grief to the eternal highway of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!"

"Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies!"

"Who, in the blissful dreams of my happy childhood used to hover above me sprinkling from her gentle hands snow-white clusters of perfumed stars."

"Yes, I now know that far into the night the Earth is flinging a strange and mysterious shaft of light whose brilliance will only be increased as the grim centuries pass by."