Ill Luck This heavy burden to uplift, O Sysiphus, thy pluck is required! And even though the heart aspired, Art is long and Time is swift. Afar from sepulchres renowned, To a graveyard, quite apart, Like a broken drum, my heart, Beats the funeral marches' sound. Many a buried jewel sleeps In the long-forgotten deeps, Far from mattock and from sound; Many a flower wafts aloft Its perfumes, like a secret soft, Within the solitudes, profound. Interior Life A long while I dwelt beneath vast porticoes, While the ocean-suns bathed with a thousand fires, And which with their great and majestic spires, At eventide looked like basaltic grottoes. The billows, in rolling depictured the skies, And mingled, in solemn and mystical strain, The all-mighteous chords of their luscious refrain With the sun-set's colours reflexed in mine eyes. It is there that I lived in exalted calm, In the midst of the azure, the splendour, the waves, While pregnant with perfumes, naked slaves Refreshed my forehead with branches of palm, Whose gentle and only care was to know The secret that caused me to languish so. Man and the Sea Free man! the sea is to thee ever dear! The sea is thy mirror, thou regardest thy soul In its mighteous waves that unendingly roll, And thy spirit is yet not a chasm less drear. Thou delight'st to plunge deep in thine image down; Thou tak'st it with eyes and with arms in embrace, And at times thine own inward voice would'st efface With the sound of its savage ungovernable moan. You are both of you, sombre, secretive and deep: Oh mortal, thy depths are foraye unexplored, Oh sea--no one knoweth thy dazzling hoard, You both are so jealous your secrets to keep! And endless ages have wandered by, Yet still without pity or mercy you fight, So mighty in plunder and death your delight: Oh wrestlers! so constant in enmity! Beauty I am lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone, And my bosom, where each one gets bruised in turn, To inspire the love of a poet is prone, Like matter eternally silent and stern. As an unfathomed sphinx, enthroned by the Nile, My heart a swan's whiteness with granite combines, And I hate every movement, displacing the lines, And never I weep and never I smile. The poets in front of mine attitudes fine (Which the proudest of monuments seem to implant), To studies profound all their moments assign, For I have all these docile swains to enchant-- Two mirrors, which Beauty in all things ignite: Mine eyes, my large eyes, of eternal Light! The Ideal It could ne'er be those beauties of ivory vignettes; The varied display of a worthless age, Nor puppet-like figures with castonets, That ever an heart like mine could engage.