Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

HERODIADE by STEPHANE MALLARME

Poem Explanation

First Line: FOR WHOM, CONSUMED WITH ANGUISH, DO YOU KEEP THE UNSEEN SPLENDOR
Last Line: ITS FRIGID JEWELS BECOMING SEPARATE AT LAST.
NURSE:

. . . For whom, consumed
With anguish, do you keep the unseen splendor
And vain mystery of your being?

HERODIADE:

For myself.

NURSE:

Poor flower growing alone without a flutter
Save for its shadow seen listless in the water.

HERODIADE:

Go, your pity with your irony keep.

NURSE:

Yet explain: O no, innocent child!
This triumphant disdain must one day lessen.

HERODIADE:

But who would touch me, by the lions respected?
I want, regardless, nothing human, and if with my eyes
Lost in paradise you see me rapt,
It is with remembering your milk once drunk.

NURSE:

Lamentable victim to her destiny offered!

HERODIADE:

Yes, it is for myself, for myself I flower secluded!
You know this, gardens of amethyst, endlessly
Buried in knowing abysses bedazzling,
You, unfathomed gold guarding your ancient luster
Under the dark sleep of a primeval soil,
You, precious stones wherefrom my eyes like flawless gems
Borrow their melodious shimmer, and you
Metallics which lend my youthful tresses
Their massive allure and a fatal splendor!
As for you, woman born in centuries iniquitous
With the sins of sibylline caves
Who of a mortal speak! Who would from the calyxes
Of my robes, fragrant of fierce delights,
Have the pale tremor of my nudity emerge,
Foretell that if the tepid azure of summer,
Toward which innately woman unveils,
In my pudency of tremulous star should see me,
I die!
I love the terror of being virgin and I fain
Would live amid the dread my hair instills in me
That I may, at evening, retired to my bed,
Inviolate reptile, feel in my useless flesh
The chill scintillation of your pallid light,
You who burn with chastity, who die to yourself,
White night of icicles and cruel snow!

And your solitary sister, O my sister eternal
Toward you my dream shall rise: indeed so rarely
Limpid this heart brooding on it
I feel I am alone in my monotonous homeland
And all around me dwell in idolatry
Of a mirror which reflects in its changeless calm
Herodiade of the pristine diamond gaze . . .
O final bliss, yes, I feel it, I am alone!

NURSE:

Madame, are you going to die then?

HERODIADE:

No, poor grandam,
Be calm and, taking your leave, forgive this hard heart,
But first, if you will, draw to the blinds,
The seraphic azure smiles in the deep windowpanes,
And I, I detest the beauteous azure!

Yonder
Billows rock, and do you not know of a country there
Where the sinister sky has the hated mien
Of Venus burning in the leafage at night:
There would I go.

Light again those tapers,
Childishness, you say, whose wax of feeble flame
Weeps amid futile gold some foreign tear
And . . .

NURSE:

Now?

HERODIADE:

Good night.

O nude flower
Of my lips, you lie.
I do wait some thing unknown
Or, perhaps, heedless of the mystery and your cries,
You loose the ultimate and wounded sobs
Of a childhood amidst its reveries sensing
Its frigid jewels becoming separate at last.



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