I translated these fragments long ago in one of the first things I ever tried to write.  The passages are as touching and fresh, the originals I mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice of Sylvie singing: 

   “A Dammartin, l’y a trois belles filles,
   L’y en a z’une plus belle que le jour!”

So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the “Ballad of Forty Years,” “Adrienne’s dead” in a convent.  That is all the story, all the idyll.  Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Reve et la Vie) were in his pocket when they found him dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.

Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the grace of his favourite old ballads.  One cannot translate things like this: 

   “Ou sont nos amoureuses?
      Elles sont au tombeau!
   Elles sont plus heureuses
      Dans un sejour plus beau.”

But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air: 

      “Neither good morn nor good night.”

   The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone;
      Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed;
   But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn,
      And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!

Gerard’s poems are few; the best are his vision of a lady with gold hair and brown eyes, whom he had loved in an earlier existence, and his humorous little piece on a boy’s love for a fair cousin, and on their winter walk together, and the welcome smell of roast turkey which greets them on the stairs, when they come home.  There are also poems of his madness, called Chimeres, and very beautiful in form.  You read and admire, and don’t understand a line, yet it seems that if we were a little more or a little less mad we would understand: 

   “Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l’Acheron: 
   Modulant tour a tour sur la lyre d’Orphee
   Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee.”

Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable, the sonnet called—­

   “El Desdichado.”

   I am that dark, that disinherited,
      That all dishonoured Prince of Aquitaine,
      The Star upon my scutcheon long hath fled;
   A black sun on my lute doth yet remain! 
   Oh, thou that didst console me not in vain,
      Within the tomb, among the midnight dead,
      Show me Italian seas, and blossoms wed,
   The rose, the vine-leaf, and the golden grain.

   Say, am I Love or Phoebus? have I been
   Or Lusignan or Biron?  By a Queen
      Caressed within the Mermaid’s haunt I lay,
   And twice I crossed the unpermitted stream,
   And touched on Orpheus’ lyre as in a dream,
      Sighs of a Saint, and laughter of a Fay!

ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN