The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  That lucid restlessness that bathes the woods …

  And from my icy breast a voice will break

  I did not know so hoarse or veiled with love …

  My charming neck seeking the winged huntress.

  So was my heart so near a heart growing weak?

  So was it me, long lashes, who thought to sleep

  In the after-sweetness, laughing at your threats …

  O vines, tenacious tendrils down my cheek,

  Or you … a weave of lashes and swaying trunks,

  Soft glow of a broken evening, arms enlaced?

  * * *

  SET IN THE SKY, MAY MY EYES TRACE MY TEMPLE!

  AND OVER ME LIE AN ALTAR BEYOND COMPARE!

  Pallor and stone cried out with all my body …

  The earth is just a band of color flowing,

  Refusing my face that blanches at the height …

  The universe sways and falters on my stem,

  The crown of reason slips my level head,

  Death is hoping to breathe this priceless rose

  Whose sweetness holds the key to its dark end!

  Then if my fragrance stirs your empty head,

  O Death, inhale at last this royal slave:

  Call to me, unbind me! … Make me despair,

  So weary of myself, discarded image!

  Listen … Wait no longer … The reborn year

  Speaks to my blood of enigmatic movements:

  The ice relinquishes its final diamonds …

  Tomorrow, the starred Benevolences sigh

  And spring will come break open the sealed fountains:

  The stunning springtime laughs and violates …

  From where? But pureness purls with such sweet words,

  The earth is seized by tenderness in the gut …

  The trees, filled out again and covered in scales,

  Laden with all their heavy limbs and with

  Too many horizons, move their ringing fleeces

  Against the sun, and rise in the bitter air

  On myriad wings of leaves they feel anew …

  Do you not hear those fluttering names of air,

  O Deaf One? … And in the vivid sky, filled

  With vibrant wood bent down beneath its height,

  The tree united rowing for and against

  The gods, a floating forest whose rough trunks

  Piously draw to their fantastic brows,

  To the sad farewells of splendid archipelagos,

  A stream that flows, O Death, under the grasses?

  * * *

  Who as a mortal could resist these waves?

  What mortal woman?

  Even I so pure,

  My knees feel the trembling of defenseless knees …

  The air breaks me. A bird’s unheard-of cries

  From childhood pierce … the darkness where my heart

  Is clenched—And roses! lifting on the sigh

  That overcame these arms that close my basket …

  Oh! In my hair I feel, light as a bee

  And ever wilder at each keener kiss,

  The charming point of my ambiguous day …

  Light! … Or you, death! But may the quicker take me! …

  My heart is beating, beating! My breast burns

  And drags me onward. Swell and strain, you hard

  And gentle witness caught in my azure weave …

  Hard within me … but soft to the infinite mouth! …

  Dear rising ghosts, whose thirst is one with mine,

  Desires, bright faces! … And you, sweet fruits of love,

  Did the gods give me these maternal forms,

  Sinuous curves and folds and chalices,

  For life to embrace an altar of delights

  Where the strange soul mingles with the eternal

  Return, and seed and milk and blood still flow?

  I am filled with the light of horror, foul harmony!

  Each kiss is presage of new deaths … I see,

  Floating, fleeing the honors of the flesh,

  The bitter millions of the unmanned dead …

  No, breaths! No, gazes, tenderness … my guests,

  A people thirsting for me, begging to live,

  It’s not by me that you will quicken … Go,

  Specters and sighs exhaled at night in vain,

  Go join the imperceptible hosts of the dead!

  I will not grant light to shades; I keep my mind

  Apart from you, still sinister and clear …

  You will not draw your lightning from my lips …

  And my heart, too … refuses you its thunder.

  I pity all of us, O whirling dust!

  Great Gods, I lose my baffled steps in you!

  I will not ask for more than your pale gleam

  Upon my face awhile, yearning to melt,

  O tear so close to falling, the only one,

  Tear that sets trembling in my human sight

  A branching multitude of mournful paths;

  You come from the soul, pride of the labyrinth,

  You bring me from my heart this hard-pressed drop,

  This extract of my precious sap that carries

  My shadows to my eyes for sacrifice,

  Tender libation of unspoken thoughts!

  Deep within me, a cave of terror seeps

  From its mysterious salt this silent water.

  Born where? What labor, ever sad and new,

  Draws you, belated tear, from bitter shadow?

  And rising through my degrees of mortal, of mother,

  You force your passage through me, willful burden,

  Your slowness chokes me in the time I live …

  I say no more, drinking your steady pace …

  —Who summons you to save my youthful wound?

  But why this wound, these sobs, these dark endeavors?

  For whom, cruel jewels, do you mark this cold body,

  Blind with its hands spread wide, avoiding hope?

  Where is this body going, stunned by its faith

  In the black night, and deaf to its unknowing?

  Hold me, unsteady earth … draped in seaweed,

  Hold me gently … Will my weakness of snow

  Press onward until it finds the waiting snare?

  Where is my swan lingering, where does he seek

  His flight? … Precious hardness … O feel of the ground

  Where my step based its sacred confidence!

  But under the living foot that feels and forms it

  And treads with horror on its native pledge,

  The earth so firm has reached my pedestal.

  My precipice is dreaming in these steps …

  The unfeeling rock face, slick with seaweed, made

  For fleeing (as in oneself, wholly alone),

  Begins … And through a winding-cloth the wind

  Ravels a brooding tangle of the sounds

  Of breakers tumbling into ruin and oars …

  Long gasps and drawn-out rasps colliding, breaking,

  Resumed far out to sea … and frantic casts

  Of different fates all roll oblivion …

  Will he who finds my footprints in the sand,

  Alas, stop thinking of himself for long?

  Hold me, unsteady earth, draped in seaweed!

  * * *

  And yet, mysterious ME, you’re still alive!

  When dawn breaks, you will recognize yourself

  With bitterness, unchanged …

                  A mirroring sea

  Rises … And now the tired erasure of signs

  Reveals on your lips a smile of yesterday

  That freezes in the east the lines of light

  And stone already pale, the prison cell

  Where the horizon’s ring will float alone …

  Behold, a pure and naked arm … I see you

  Again, my arm … You bear the dawn …

        �
�                                       O rude

  Awakening of a victim left unfinished …

  Threshold so tender … shining reef revealed

  By the low tide, and washed by the dying swell! …

  The shadow leaving me, immortal Host,

  Reveals me burning red with new desires

  On the dire altar of all my memories.

  Out there, the foam is struggling to be seen;

  There, an eternal fisherman will reel

  With every wave that breasts his rocking boat.

  All things will thus fulfill their solemn act

  Of always reappearing, unique and chaste,

  And of restoring the once-ardent tomb

  To the gracious state of universal laughter.

  * * *

  Greetings! Divinities of salt and rose,

  And first-found playthings of the newborn light,

  Islands! … Soon swarming hives, when the first flame

  Will make your rock, you islands I foresee,

  Glow red with the flush of stirring paradises;

  Brave peaks imbued with life by the fire’s touch,

  Woods that will buzz with creatures and ideas

  And hymns of men fulfilled by the air’s just gifts,

  Islands! each girdled by the murmuring sea,

  Mothers and virgins still for all these marks,

  Upon my knees I find you marvelous Fates:

  Your flowers are all-surpassing in the air,

  But in the water, how your feet are cold!

  * * *

  The preparations of the soul grown calm,

  My death, a secret child so quickly formed,

  And you, divine disdain that gave me wings,

  The chaste recedings of my destiny:

  So, fervor, were you just a noble moment?

  No one has ventured closer to the gods

  To paint her forehead with their sweeping breath,

  And calling on the depths of perfect night

  Aspired to the supreme murmur on her lips …

  I stood the brilliant blaze of death so pure,

  As once I stood the brilliance of the sun …

  My desperate body bared its breast where the soul,

  Drunk on itself, on silence and on glory,

  Ready to fade away from its own memory,

  Listens, hopeful, to this heart striking

  The pious wall,—worn down by secret blows

  Until it holds from mere complacency

  The lightest lifting of a leaf, my presence …

  Waiting in vain, and vain … For she who weeps

  For pity before her mirror can never die.

  * * *

  O in my madness, should I have fulfilled

  My marvelous end of choosing as demise

  That lucid spurning of the shades of fate?

  Where will you find a more transparent death,

  A purer slope for sliding toward my doom,

  Than on this victim’s unresisting gaze,

  Slit open, pale, who bleeds without regret?

  What is her blood, no longer secret, worth?

  The crimson leaves her in such white repose

  At being’s end, so lovely in her weakness!

  She soothes the hour that comes to blot her out,

  The sovereign moment cannot make her pale,

  Now the empty flesh embraces a dark fountain …

  She grows more distant and ever more alone …

  And with my heart approaching such a fate,

  I saw my mourners on winding cypress paths …

  I felt that I was led and offered up

  To a future made of aromatic smoke,

  All promised, promised to the happy clouds!

  I even saw me as this misty tree

  Whose majesty, so lightly thrown away,

  Surrenders to its love of open space.

  Vast being fills me, and my holy heart

  Expires the incense of an endless form …

  All radiant bodies tremble in my essence! …

  Enough! … Stop stirring up that memory!

  Dark lily! Dire allusion of the skies,

  Your vigor failed to break a priceless vessel …

  Of all life’s moments, you touched the ultimate …

  —But who could triumph over power itself,

  Eager to witness with your eyes the day

  That chose your brow for its resplendent tower?

  Yet seek to know at least: by what dark paths

  Did night return you from the dead to day?

  Remember who you are; reclaim that thread

  (Your golden finger vies for it with dawn)

  From instinct: thread which, blindly followed, led

  You to this shore, and gave you back your life …

  Be subtle … cruel … or even subtler! … Lie,

  But know! … Enlighten me, by what enchantments,

  Coward whose tepid breath could not escape her,

  Nor fondness for her breast of perfumed clay,

  What self-reflection, reptile, gave you back

  Your sullen spirits and your dank perfumes?

  * * *

  Yesterday the deep, the mastering flesh

  Betrayed me … Oh! By neither dream nor touch …

  No demon or perfume, no reverie

  Of arms draped dying round a manly neck;

  And neither did the Swan-God, burning white,

  With bristling feathers brush against my thoughts …

  He would have found the tenderest of nests!

  For in the dark, my body’s virgin grace

  Was offered up, a luscious sacrifice …

  But sleep was taken with so great a sweetness

  That I grew weak, and wound about myself

  At my hair’s roots, I lost my nervous empire.

  Held in my arms, I made myself another …

  Who flees? … Grows strange? … Who sinks into herself?

  My heart was melted at what hidden turn?

  What conch shell spoke the name that I had lost?

  What faithless tide was it that pulled me back

  From my precocious and still pure extreme,

  And stole away the meaning of my sigh?

  As a bird alights, I had to fall asleep.

  Perhaps it was the hour the prophetess

  Within us loses interest, growing weary:

  She is no longer the same … A deep child

  Shrinks back from the degrees of the unknown

  And calls, already far, for hands she left

  Behind. She must submit to these dead queens

  And take, as her new face, a breath …

                                                    Softly,

  I am here: my forehead touches this consent …

  Tasting ashes, I forgive this body.

  I surrender to the joy of sinking down,

  With harrowed arms, watched by eyes in the blackness,

  Through words that are not mine, stammered, unending …

  Now sleep, my wisdom. Create yourself this absence;

  Return to the seed, the first dark innocence,

  Give yourself over to the snakes, the treasures …

  Forever, sleep forever, sink to sleep!

  (The low-built door is a ring … through which the veil

  Passes … All dies, all laughs in the babbling throat …

  A bird is drinking from your mouth, unseen …

  Speak low, come lower … The dark is not so dark …)

  * * *

  Delights of winding-clothes, my warm disorder,

  Sheets where I spread and search myself, and yield,

  Where I meant to drown the beatings of my heart,

  Almost a living tomb among my rooms,

  That breathes and where et
ernity is heard,

  Imbued with me whom you have taken whole,

  O form of my form and hollow heat I knew

  As my own when I withdrew into myself,

  See how the pride that sinks into your folds

  Is mingled in the end with vulgar dreams!

  Smoothed in your sheets, a semblance of her death,

  The idol must arrange herself and sleep,

  Wearied pure woman, and her eyes in her tears,

  When the charms and caverns of her naked secrets

  And that last glow of love her body held

  Breaks down her loss and all her mortal ties.

  Ark, entirely secret and yet so near,

  My raptures strove this night to burst your chain,

  But all I did was rock with my laments

  Your sides, laden with day and with creations.

  My eyes, misled by so much azure, coldly

  Watch the exquisite star extinguished there;

  This youthful sun of my amazements seems

  To shine upon a distant forebear’s pain,

  So fiercely does it burn away regret

  And form a cherished substance out of dawn

  That was becoming the substance of a tomb …

  How lovely! Over the sea and on my feet

  You’re rising! … I am still the one you breathe,

  My veil lifts, and floats into your realms …

  … So, vain farewells if I live, did I conceive

  Mere dreams? … In windswept clothes, if I approach

  This edge, unfazed, to breathe the flying spray,

  Drink with my eyes the vast and laughing brine,

  Leaning against the wind, the quickening air

  Across my face a summons from the sea;

  If the intense soul blows, and the sheer wave

  On battered wave swells furiously, if the swell

  Roars at the point and burns a monstrous faith,

  Come from the open sea to retch the depths

  Upon this rock and send a dazzling burst

  Of icy sparks surging toward my thoughts

  And over my skin, stung by bitter waking,

  Then I must love, despite myself, O Sun,

  My heart where you descend to know yourself,

  Powerful, warm delight of being born,

  Fire that draws a virgin’s flesh and blood

  Under her grateful, gold-sheathed breast, on high!

  From the Notebooks 1915–1921

  Forest

  The solemn silence of a single forest. The lone sound of a leaf. The weight of all these red leaves on the ground which is nowhere to be seen. The trunks blue-tinged and so pure. These shafts at every distance each block their piece of depth, but the unordered distances, the gaps between them, give the impression of transparency, of looking through a fluid and shifting element (we are at the bottom of the sea, at the depth of the height of these trees), since the slightest movement alters and blurs the vision, changes its configuration.