LA FEMME (Alphonse de Lamartine)

Lyrics:

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THE WOMAN (Lamartine)
O woman, living flash whose brightness overthrows me!
O vase of splendor that a day of God pierces!
Why do our delighted eyes melt under yours?
Why my soul in vain under my compressed hand
Is she coming to you like a burning eagle?
Whose fire broke the links?

Winter is already whitening the peaks of my life.
On the road to the tomb, which my feet followed,
Ah! I have many nights and days behind me!
A look of fifteen years, if he deigned to go down,
In my consumed heart, nothing but ash
Ashes of passion that always throb!

I should turn my heart from their face,
To put myself down by lowering their eyes on their passage,
And look from afar at these dazzling fronts,
As we see rising from their closed urn
The waves of perfume and holy smoke
Whose choir boys will breathe incense.

I should contemplate with indifference
These virgins, radiant spring hope,
As we see passing without regret and without tears,
At the edge of a seated river, these fugitive waves
Whose fast current leads to other shores
Streams where lovers have stripped flowers.

However, the more life in the sun evaporates,
O girls of Eden, and the more we adore you!
The smell of your sighs perfumes the winds;
And even when the winter of your graces sinks us,
No, it's not air that your lip aspires:
The air you breathe is the soul of the living!

Because the man hatched one day a kiss from your mouth,
This man whose heart was the first layer,
Remembers forever his warming nest,
From the breast where from his life he drew the spark,
Hugs of love in the hollow of your armpit,
And kiss closing his child's eyelid!

But if any man's look at your face yearns,
It's not just because your smile
Embalm on your teeth the air that it makes palpitate,
That under the black curtain lowered eyelids
We see the shadow of the eyelashes collect thoughts
Where our soul is flying and would like to live;

It's not just because of your head
The light sliding, without an angle stops it,
On the undulation of your polished limbs,
T'en from above in its silk rays
Like a dress of air and day, which drowns you
In the luminous ether of a garment without folds;

It's not just because you're unfolding
Voluptuously those arms of which you bind us,
Chain which from one heart unites the two parts,
That your wood neck on the wing spills,
And let this cup pour into your breast
Nectar in the mouth and drunkenness in the eyes:

But it is that the Lord in you, his creature,
Lighted the hearth of the fires of nature;
That by you all love has its presentiment;
May all pleasures, whose true name is woman,
Cross your beautiful body or go through your soul,
As all lightness fall from the firmament!

This warmth of heaven, with which your breast abounds,
Has two radiations to set the world on fire,
According to the fact that his home makes his fire ripple.
When on one heart your soul condenses it,
Man is king, it's love! he becomes providence
When it spreads over all and springs back to God.

So we see the child, spilled on your hip,
Destroy the button that your udder leans,
Like a lamb playing with the stream he drinks;
The teenager, a gesture on your knees recalls,
Follow the thought, the book he spells,
The childlike wisdom written under your finger;

The orphan hiding in the folds of your dress,
The needy savor the look he steals,
The old man at your feet to sit in your sun;
The dying man in his bed, returned without shaking
On this woman's arm where death itself is sweet,
Fall asleep in that bosom he pressed upon awakening!

Love and charity, same name which one names
The pity of the Most High and the ecstasy of man!
Yes, you have understood, painter with tongues of fire!
Beauty, under your hand, by a double mystery,
Unite these two loves of heaven and earth.
Ah! let's keep one for the man, and burn the other to God.