Nocturne

You that have heard the heartbeat of the night,

you that have heard, in the long, sleepless hours,

a closing door, the rumble of distant wheels,

a vague echo, a wandering sound from somewhere:

you, in the moments of mysterious silence,

when the forgotten ones issue from their prison--

in the hour of the dead, In the hour of repose--

will know how to read the bitterness in my verses.

I fill them, as one would fill a glass, with all

my grief for remote memories and black misfortunes,

the nostalgia of my flower-intoxicated soul

and the pain of a heart grown sorrowful with fêtes;

with the burden of not being what I might have been,

the loss of the kingdom that was awaiting me,

the thought of the instant when I might not have been born

and the dream my life has been ever since I was!

All this has come in the midst of that boundless silence

in which the night develops earthly illusions,

and I feel as if an echo of the world's heart

had penetrated and disturbed my own.