Autumn sonnets
Sonnet d'automne-
Ils me disent, tes yeux, clairs comme le cristal: | |||||||||||||||||
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| daniel gerhartz painting woman autumn leafs |
Your eyes like crystal ask me, clear and mute,
"in me, strange lover, what do you admire?"
Be lovely: hush: my heart, whom all things tire
Except the candour of the primal brute,
Would hide from you the secret burning it
And its black legend written out in fire,
O soother of the sleep that I respire!
Passion I hate, and I am hurt by wit.
Let us love gently. In his lair laid low,
Ambushed in shades, Love strings his fatal bow.
I know his ancient arsenal complete,
Crime, horror, lunacy — O my pale daisy!
Are we not suns in Autumn, silver-hazy,
O my so white, so snow-cold Marguerite?
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
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| "Art~ Felix Mas" |
Autumn Sonnet - Poem by Jon Lloyd
Each second leaves fall one by one to ground,And languidly caress their neighbours one
By one, as if in fond farewell. The sun
Still smiles, but weakly now, as though it’s bound
By Autumn’s spell. Its rays make plumes of steam
Rise gently off the grass, and now and then
A bird’s sweet song bewitches me again.
All else is silent like as in a dream.
I love this time, when all drifts off to sleep.
And nature’s palette fades to softer hue.
The ground now crunches brittle ‘neath my feet
In just the place where once the flowers grew.
But flowers, I admit, I love you too,
I long for Spring to bring you life anew!
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| "Art~ Felix Mas" |
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one,
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure — if I can let you go.
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| "Art~ Felix Mas" |
Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.
I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.
Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all
Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.”
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| "Art~ Felix Mas" |
That time of year thou mayst in me behold (Sonnet 73)
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Federico García Lorca
- Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint
Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.
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