In the Light Of Read online

  Airs and forms expiring, murmur on murmur …

  a choir to temper impotence and absence in reprise!

  A choir of crystal glasses, of nocturnal melodies …

  indeed, so quickly do the nerves take up the chase

  the foremost runner finds he comes last in the race.

  4 WAR

  Child that I was, certain skies refined my optic:

  my physiognomy was changed by Zodiac.

  The Phenomena were set in motion. Still —

  eternally inflected Now — mathematical

  infinity pursues me through the world, where I

  endure the approbation of society,

  respected by strange childhoods, by enormous

  feelings whether troubled or harmonious.

  I dream of a war of right and might, a logic

  unforeseen as simple as a phrase of music.

  CODA

  Genius (Génie)

  He is affection and he is the present, since he has made the house open to the foam of winter and to the murmur of summer, he who has purified the drinks, the food — he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman joy of lingering.

  He is affection and he is the future, love and strength which we, upright in our rages and our boredoms, see flitting through the tempestuous sky and the ecstatic banners.

  He is love: he is perfect, reinvented measure; he is marvellous and unexpected reason, and eternity: beloved instrument of fatal qualities. We have all known the terror of his concessions, and of ours; O thrill of health, the swooping upwards of our faculties, our self-considering affection and our passion for him — he who loves us for his unending life …

  And we remember him, and he journeys … And if the Adoration bell resounds and goes, so does the bell of his promise: Away, superstitions, away! Those former bodies, those ménages, those ancient times, away! Ours is the era that has foundered!

  He will not go away, he will not descend again from any heaven to redeem the wrath of women, nor the gaiety of men, nor all this sin. For it is done, he being and being loved.

  O the surges of his breathing, head following head, his swooping off: O terrible celerity in the perfecting of forms and action.

  O fecundity of mind, the immensity of the universe!

  His body! The dreamed deliverance, the shattering of grace crossed by new violence!

  To behold him and behold him! All the ancient genuflections and penalties revoked at his passing.

  His day! The abolition of all sonorous and arbitrary sufferings, in a more plangent music.

  His step! Vaster than migrations, than ancient invasions.

  O him and us! Pride more compassionate than squandered charities.

  O world, the glassy song of fresh disasters!

  He has known us all and has loved us all: may we learn, this winter night — from tumultuous pole to castle, cape to rocky cape, from crowd to beach, from glance to gaze, our strength and feelings ebbed — to hail him, and to see him, to return him to his echo; and from under the tides and high in the wastes of snow to follow all that he beholds: the surges of his breathing, his body, and his day.

  Acknowledgements

  These versions are based on the French text in Rimbaud, Illuminations, in a new translation by Louis Varèse, New Directions, 1946, with some alternative readings from Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems, introduced and edited by Oliver Bernard, Penguin Classics, 1962.

  Acknowledgement is due to the TLS where some of this work was published first.

  About the Author

  Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast, where he lives. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998, with responsibility for Traditional Music, and, more latterly, Literature.

  In October 2003 he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast.

  He has won several literary awards, including the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and in 2003 he was made an honorary member of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association. Breaking News was awarded the 2003 Forward Prize.

  Also by Ciaran Carson in print editions from The Gallery Press

  For All We Know (Poems)

  In the Light Of (Poems, after Rimbaud’s Illuminations)

  On the Night Watch (Poems)

  Opera Et Cetera (Poems)

  The Alexandrine Plan (after Baudelaire, Malarmé and Rimbaud)

  The Midnight Court (Poems, translated from Brian Merriman)

  The New Estate and Other Poems

  The Twelfth of Never (Poems)

  Until Before After (Poems)

  Copyright

  In the Light Of

  was first published

  simultaneously in paperback

  and in a clothbound edition

  on 27 September 2012.

  The Gallery Press

  Loughcrew

  Oldcastle

  County Meath

  Ireland

  www.gallerypress.com

  All rights reserved. For permission

  to reprint or broadcast this work,

  write to The Gallery Press.

  The publisher acknowledges assistance

  from the Illuminations gallery at the

  National University of Ireland, Maynooth,

  in the publication of this book.

  © Ciaran Carson 2012

  ePub ISBN 978–1–85235–556–2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.