“Until, at last, opening his wings, now rent into shreds, exasperated, burning more and more fiercely in the frenzy of his excitement, and with his eyes of bronze always fixed motionlessly upon the azure sky, he dies in his song upon the withered grain.”

This is difficult to translate at all satisfactorily, owing to the multitude of images compressed together.  But the idea expressed is a fine one—­the courage of the insect challenging the sun, and only chanting more and more as the heat and the thirst increase.  The poem has, if you like, the fault of exaggeration, but the colour and music are very fine; and even the exaggeration itself has the merit of making the images more vivid.

It will not be necessary to quote another text; we shall scarcely have the time; but I want to translate to you something of another poem upon the same insect by the modern French poet Jean Aicard.  In this poem, as in the little poem by Gautier, which I quoted to you, the writer puts his thought in the mouth of the insect, so to say—­that is, makes the insect tell its own story.

“I am the impassive and noble insect that sings in the summer solstice from the dazzling dawn all the day long in the fragrant pine-wood.  And my song is always the same, regular as the equal course of the season and of the sun.  I am the speech of the hot and beaming sun, and when the reapers, weary of heaping the sheaves together, lie down in the lukewarm shade, and sleep and pant in the ardour of noonday—­then more than at any other time do I utter freely and joyously that double-echoing strophe with which my whole body vibrates.  And when nothing else moves in all the land round about, I palpitate and loudly sound my little drum.  Otherwise the sunlight triumphs; and in the whole landscape nothing is heard but my cry,—­like the joy of the light itself.

“Like a butterfly I take up from the hearts of the flowers that pure water which the night lets fall into them like tears.  I am inspired only by the almighty sun.  Socrates listened to me; Virgil made mention of me.  I am the insect especially beloved by the poets and by the bards.  The ardent sun reflects himself in the globes of my eyes.  My ruddy bed, which seems to be powdered like the surface of fine ripe fruit, resembles some exquisite key-board of silver and gold, all quivering with music.  My four wings, with their delicate net-work of nerves, allow the bright down upon my black back to be seen through their transparency.  And like a star upon the forehead of some divinely inspired poet, three exquisitely mounted rubies glitter upon my head.”