La Lyre Haïtienne: Ciseleur et Poète (Poem)
La Lyre Haïtienne
It is under this title that we will henceforth publish the verses of our young Haitian poets. The readers of La Fraternité have already been able to appreciate the charming talent of our collaborators Louis Borno and Georges Sylvain. Today we introduce them to Mr. Auguste Scott, a friend and former classmate, who successfully practices art in all its forms: poetry, painting, music, etc.---
Ciseleur et Poète
To Mr. Amédée BrunI
In the dark workshop where a sad day was drifting,
The strange artist is there, who is bent over and chiselling.
He chisels! — a tawny spark
Bursts out, from a spoke making gold from a contour.
He chisels! and, bathing his fine forehead made heavy
By the dream, sweat in flowing streams;
And the impeccable and pure form that discerns
The genius, embellishes the masterpieces around him
In heaps. Folded back onto the infamous craft,
The sublime worker feels rising in his soul,
The troubling giddiness of a happy daydream,
Notwithstanding the effort of solitary labour
Mournfully lights, in his great austere eye,
The sombre blaze of the flame, Ideal!
II
I often passed by the sad dwelling,
And I would always see him again with his slow gesture,
The man with the strange and mad profile, the sombre artist,
Hunched over in the darkness, and chiselling.
And always on his forehead saddened by the heavy dream,
The same flame brought ardour to his sparkling eye;
And always the length of some fantastical work
Shimmered with a gleaming thrill in one contour.
I bounded toward this man with the Dantean face,
Whose hand caressed the pure gold of an arabesque,
In the soft clarity of the colourless and pale day.
"Why always pursue a senseless task,
When the crowd, unmoved by the fruits of your thought,
Pass by without seeing it?" He replies: "For art!"
III
Send off
And so, while the Dream with its murderous wing,
Brushes our forehead with the same fatal flight,
May the same fire of a tyrannical Ideal
Burn incessantly under our eyelids.
To you who, moulder of tawny material,
Full of the haughty disdain of the pedestal,
Who always has made the ornamental tower spring forth
From some blond sonnet pure like a prayer,
I offer these three jewels worthy of your metal,
Poet, who always polishes, like a precious
Stone, the rhyme from the crude form.
I bathed in clarity their crystal faces,
So that the allusion, limpid and familiar,
Would shine like a humid pearl in the light!
Auguste Scott
Haiti, January 1890