Henri De Regnier walks in a Spring garden of long ago...

A flower meditation excerpt
Henri De Regnier

In the woods you will find lungwort, with its violet
and wine-coloured flower, the leaves verdigris, spotted
with white, hairy an very rough; there is a holy
legend about it. The lady's smock to which the the
saffron butterfly comes; the light crowfoot and the
black hellbore; the hyacinth which one crushes easily,
and which, crushed, has sticky brightnesses; the evil
smelling jonquil, the anemone, and the narcissus which
makes one think of the snows of Swiss mountainsides.


Translation by Amy Lowell

Ode by Henri De Regnier

Excerpt from Ode III

I have know you, dear naked Shade, with your
hair heavy with sunlight and pale gold, with your
smiling mouth and your sweet flesh. From my most
distant days beyond, you have come, at the ends
of old roads of corn and mosses, along meadows,
besides woods, when I followed the path and the brook,
happy in the clear brook and the fresh pathway,
and in my hands, between my fingers, the flower
fathered in the thick grass was all damp with dew
and trembling with the gold of a resting bee.

Henri De Regnier

Translated by Amy Lowell


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