Read Online Selected Poems 1930-1988 by Samuel Beckett - Free Book Online Page A

have shown to children those dorados
    Of the blue wave, those golden fish, those singing fish;
    In spumes of flowers I have risen from my anchors
    And canticles of wind have blessed my wings.
    Then toward me, rocking softly on its sobbing,
    Weary of the torment of the poles and zones,
    The sea would lift its yellow polyps on flowers
    Of gloom and hold me – like a woman kneeling –
    A stranded sanctuary for screeching birds,
    Flaxen-eyed, shiteing on my trembling decks,
    Till down they swayed to sleep, the drowned, spreadeagled,
    And, sundering the fine tendrils, floated me.
    Now I who was wrecked in the inlets’ tangled hair
    And flung beyond birds aloft by the hurricane,
    Whose carcass drunk with water Monitors
    And Hanseatic sloops could not have salved;

    Who, reeking and free in a fume of purple spray,
    Have pierced the skies that flame as a wall would flame
    For a chosen poet’s rapture, and stream and flame
    With solar lichen and with azure snot;
    Who scudded, with my escort of black sea-horses,
    Fury of timber, scarred with electric moons,
    When Sirius flogged into a drift of ashes
    The furnace-cratered cobalt of the skies;
    I who heard in trembling across a waste of leagues
    The turgent Stroms and Behemoths moan their rut,
    I weaving for ever voids of spellbound blue,
    Now remember Europe and her ancient ramparts.
    I saw archipelagoes of stars and islands launched me
    Aloft on the deep delirium of their skies:
    Are these the fathomless nights of your sleep and exile,
    Million of golden birds, oh Vigour to be?

    But no more tears. Dawns have broken my heart,
    And every moon is torment, every sun bitterness;
    I am bloated with the stagnant fumes of acrid loving –
    May I split from stem to stern and founder, ah founder!
    I want none of Europe’s waters unless it be
    The cold black puddle where a child, full of sadness,
    Squatting, looses a boat as frail
    As a moth into the fragrant evening.
    Steeped in the languors of the swell, I may
    Absorb no more the wake of the cotton-freighters,
    Nor breast the arrogant oriflammes and banners,
    Nor swim beneath the leer of the pontoons.

PAUL ÉLUARD

L’amoureuse
    Elle est debout sur mes paupières
    Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,
    Elle a la forme de mes mains,
    Elle a la couleur de mes yeux,
    Elle s’engloutit dans mon ombre
    Comme une pierre sur le ciel.
    Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts
    Et ne me laisse pas dormir.
    Ses rêves en pleine lumière
    Font s’évaporer les soleils,
    Me font rire, pleurer et rire,
    Parler sans avoir rien à dire. 

Lady Love
    She is standing on my lids
    And her hair is in my hair,
    She has the colour of my eye,
    She has the body of my hand,
    In my shade she is engulfed
    As a stone against the sky.
    She will never close her eyes
    And she does not let me sleep.
    And her dreams in the bright day
    Make the suns evaporate,
    And me laugh cry and laugh,
    Speak when I have nothing to say.

A perte de vue dans le sens de mon corps
    Tous les arbres toutes leurs branches toutes leurs feuilles
    L’herbe à la base les rochers et les maisons en masse
    Au loin la mer que ton œil baigne
    Ces images d’un jour après l’autre
    Les vices les vertus tellement imparfaits
    La transparence des passants dans les rues de hasard
    Et les passantes exhalées par tes recherches obstinées
    Tes idées fixes au cœur de plomb aux lèvres vierges
    Les vices les vertus tellement imparfaits
    La ressemblance des regards de permission avec les yeux que tu conquis
    La confusion des corps des lassitudes des ardeurs
    L’imitation des mots des attitudes des idées
    Les vices les vertus tellement imparfaits
    L’amour c’est l’homme inachevé.

Out of Sight in the Direction of My Body
    All the trees all their boughs all their leaves
    The grass at the base the rocks the massed houses
    Afar the sea that thine eye washes
    Those images of one day and the next
    The vices the virtues that