>>7730252Turn down to me your eyes, so blue and full of stars!
For just one charming glance, divinely healing balm,
I'll raise the veil for you of pleasure's secret depths,
And lull you fast asleep within an endless dream!'
But then Hippolyta, lifting her troubled head:
- 'My Delphine, do not think that I repent our love;
I'm not ungrateful, but I suffer in distress
As if I'd been a part of some strange feast at night.
I feel such heavy dread dissolving over me,
And black battalions of a scattered troop of ghosts
Who wish to lead me off on roads that shift and move
Beneath a bloody sky that closes all around.
Have we committed then a strange, forbidden act?
Please, if you can, explain my trouble and my fright:
I shake and tremble when you say to me "my love!"
And still I feel my mouth is yearning at your call.
My heart's-ease and my dear, don't look at me that way!
O sister of my choice, you'll always be my love,
And even though you were an ambush ready-set,
The first disturbing step along the road to Hell!'
Delphine, then, rising up to shake her tragic mane,
As if before the tripod, stamping furiously,
Flashing her fatal eye, answered in despot's voice:
- 'Who in the face of love dares speak to me of Hell!
Accursed may he be, the one with useless dreams
Who in stupidity, promoting to the world
A sterile conundrum, impossible to solve,
First sought to mix the ways of virtue and of love!
Anyone who could join within a mystic bond
Shadow with glowing heat, the night-time with the day,
Never will come to warm his paralytic flesh
At this refulgent sun, which people know as love!
Go, if you will, and find some brutish fiance;
Go give a virgin heart to torturous embrace;
And, livid, with your fill of horror and remorse,
Come running back to me with scars across your breasts...
