Otokar Březina

“ The glare of bygone days, time turned to night so bleak
That it changed the peace of night to a charmless, turpid day.
All this flared in my soul, and the wishes of the dead
Re-echoed within my I, with a mortal sobbing sound.
Over my lifeless youth, I bent my musing head
As one bends over a lover, whom death had found. ”

“ A question long thought dead and speechless, rises in smoke from its decay,
Like the sweetness of a thought, that melted too late with life’s destructive gale,
Like the burning oil of fully ripened olives . . . Over my dreams’ furrowed way,
I sail at night with the song of waves that dash beneath my meter’s oars,
I am carried away beneath the celestial map’s outspread, starry wings,
And I feel in the winds that blow from desolate island shores,
The peace of cypress blossoms, of soft, warm shadows and glowing Springs. ”

“ A white glow of light you poured into my soul’s lamp
’Til in an agony of red it bled into the dark.
I walked in thought, beneath the day’s ceiling cold and damp
As in the dreaded melancholies of a darkened park,
Where on the frescoed walls, the twilight’s billows fall
And long forgotten legends gaze through the darkened frames
Like windows that open onto the centuries’ mystic hall
And gaze on the darkened horizon of Mysteries without names . . . ”

“ Time flows into the void; night’s shadows quake with dearth,
The dikes of the black sea of space crumble beneath the night’s wrath,
The heavy foam of darkness sputters forth, and the earth
Swallowed by the gaping depths, swerves from its beaten path. ”

“ I gathered in my soul the tenderness of mystic rays,
And in the Secret shrine I knelt with unknown qualms.
My soul is saddened now, and full of a longing scent,
My thought is just a taper of feeble light that shone
Quiveringly in the human sconce, impure and bent
A taper upon the timeless altar of the Great Unknown . . . ”

“ Her days had not the hue, the scent, the splendor of o bloom;
She plucked an arid fruit, whose ashen taste was spent
For nourishment from off the tree of doom.
Into her cheeks poverty’s keen edged dust its beauty seared,
And into her eyes, where years but cooled the inflamed pain,
Then as a torrid simoon at her feet it swirled and reared
Allowing her in its waves her exhausted strength to gain.
Beneath the burden of dark years she bent her back,
Labor’s corrosive heat drained freshness from her banks ”

“ It deadened the steps . . . With whispers of awed respect quivered the voice of my soul,
(Something languishly feeble filled the air as if its freshness were absorbed
By the glowing thirst of burning tapers.) ”

“ My Springtime was a lonely elegiac song
Played tremulously for me by the Life I knew,
The days of my joys were like a cluster of grass grown strong
As it crowds along the wall and glistens with fallen dew . . . ”