The Virgin, the Vivid, and the Beautiful Today

Stéphane Mallarmé

The virgin, vivid, and beautiful today—
Will it tear at us with one drunken beat of wing
This hardened, long-forgotten lake where, glittering,
The lucid ice of flights unfled still haunts the gray?

A swan of earlier days remembers being
Magnificent, yet frees itself without a ray
Of hope, for never having sung the place to stay
When barren winter blazed with its wearying.

Its whole neck will shake off this white agony
Imposed by space upon the bird denying it,
But not the horror of the ground that grips the plume.

A phantom, by this place assigned to purity’s gloom,
It freezes into the cold reverie of contempt
Worn by the swan in useless exile.