the quémandero,13
All in pomp assembled to inhale a sacrifice,
A Jew on the brazero!
For everything overwhelms me: oblivion, misery, desire,
Are parceling out my days!
My amours embroidered the crêpe of my life with gold,
No more amours henceforth.
Poor girl! I was the one who dragged you
Along the path of pain;
But with a stronger poison, before it withered you.
You killed unhappiness!
Oh I, no more than a child, timid, weak, force-fed
With that sharpened blade
Have not sliced with this cowardly arm
My ulcerated breast!
I ruminate my disgrace; its shadow is pursued
By a customary regret.
What renders me so spineless and chains me to life?
Poor Job on his dung-heap.
HYMN TO THE SUN
There, in the sunken path, a solitary stroller
In my clandestine disgrace,
I come, suffering, and lie down on the ground
Like a brute beast
I nurse my hunger, head on a stone
Appealing to sleep
To staunch my burning eyelids a little;
I have exhausted my ration of sunlight!
Back there in the city, the sordid avarice
Of the king, over every Champart,14
Sunlight and void are sold to the human flock;
I have paid; I have my share!
But over everyone, all equal before you, just sun.
You shed your rays,
Which are no gentler on the face of an august prince
Than the dirty face of a beggar in rags.
Excerpt from a piece entitled
HAPPINESS AND UNHAPPINESS
He is a bird, the bard! He must remain wild;
By night in the branches, he twitters his song;
A muddy duck strutting on the river-bank
Saluting every rising or setting sun.
He is a bird, the bard! He must grow old austere,
Sober, poor, ignored, grim and careworn,
Singing for no one, and having nothing on earth
But a torn cape, a dagger and the skies!
But the bard today is a womanly voice,
A tight-fitting suit, a scrubbed pretty face,
A parrot on a perch, singing for Madame,
In a gilded cage, a pet canary;
He is marvelously fat, weeping warm tears
Over obligatory evils after a long meal,
Carrying an umbrella and swearing by his arms,
And, elixir in hand, invoking death,
Jewels, balls, flowers, horses, châteaux, slender mistresses
Are the materials of his leaden poems:
Nothing for poverty, nothing for the humble in distress;
Always insulting them in his velvet verses.
Please! Spare us your autocratic airs;
Good for you, if you glean wealth by the handful,
But don’t dress your verses up like your servants,
Which cause our foreheads, circled in rags, to blush.
Hey you, fluffy perihelion of those suns,
Don’t take so much care to hide your tatters,
It’s only in their refuge that the mind unwinds;
The bard only grows intoxicated by need!
I have caressed death, laughing at suicide,
Often and gladly, when I was happier;
Now I hate it, and am afraid of it,
Wretched and undermined by homicidal hunger.
POVERTY
By my cheerful expression, laughter on my lips.
You deem me happy, comfortable, unleavened and fever-free,
Living from day to day with no ambition,
Ignorant of remorse, virginal to affliction;
Through the walls of a noble breast,
Can one see the desiccating heat and the undermining fire?
In a dull lamp that is exhaustible,
It is necessary, like the heart, to open it or break it.
When you took your head to the executioners, poor André,15
You struck your forehead upon the cart in rage;
Having not done enough for immortality,
For your country, its glory and its liberty.
How many times, on the rock that borders life,
Have I kicked my foot, banged my desirous head,
Crying my long and painful torment to the skies;
I sensed my power, and I felt shackles!
Power...shackles...so what? Nothing! One more poet
Who would make the divine, but his Muse is mute,
His power is in shackles—get away! We no longer believe
In this sighted century in any but accomplished talents;
Work, we no longer believe in marvelous futures.
Work! Oh, the need that howls in my ears
Stifling any thinker that rears up in my bosom!
What reply can I make to the chords of my lute? I’m hungry.
Oh, all of that makes the heart bleed. Let us pass on.
His independent stance and his violent love of liberty had caused him to be labeled a redoubtable Republican. He thought he ought to respond to that accusation in the preface to his Rhapsodies, “I am a Republican,” he said, “as a lynx would understand it; my Republicanism is that of lycanthropy! If I speak of a republic, it is because that word, to me, represents the broadest independence that association and civilization can permit. I am a Republican because I cannot be a Carib Indian; I need an enormous sum of liberty; will the Republic give that to me? I have no personal experience of it, but when that hope is dashed, like so many others, I shall still have the Missouri!”
Because of that, the newspapers called those verses lycanthropic, him a lycanthrope and his turn of mind lycanthropism. The epithet had a great success in society, and stuck. He was pleased to hear it; so, we have deemed him worthy of our respect for not disowning that characteristic banner.
In the midst of all the hateful criticisms hurled