Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme sœur,
Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur,
Et vers le ciel errant de ton œil angélique
Monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique,
Fidèle, un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur !
- Vers l'Azur attendri d'Octobre pâle et pur
Qui mire aux grands bassins sa langeur infinie
Et laisse, sur l'eau morte où la fauve agonie
Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,
Se traîner le soleil jaune d'un long rayon.

"Mon âme", the poetic soul, but truly poetic, and also the loved one, the expression that denotes the very core of one's being; it is the center of the human that climbs, up, up, and out of itself, like the rising waters of a fountain, or bent as the great weight of the moon bends water, "vers ton front oü rêve, ô calme soeur", where the contrast is immediate between the calm serenity of sorority and fervent masculine rising; here is a calm that lapses into sleep, the sleep of "un automne jonché de taches de rousseur", which can only be indentified with the hypnotic crimson folds of the lover's dress, a shimmering of phantom light that finally gives way to the white flicker of "le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique"; infinite, a sky, and yet immediately limited, immediately the globe that holds it, like the unescapable earth, the unescapable winter that autumn portends; the paradox continued in the angel who errs; the fallen angel and the sky captured in the globe of the smallest proportions, but nonetheless the soul climbs towards this vague infinity of being; bounded because it is being, but insofar as it is, being infinite.

The "jardin mélancolique" must bear out these contradictions, and reminds us of the original garden of Eden and the first sin. So the fallen angel of infinitely orbed and delimited oneness inhabits the garden, in one of those grandly contradictory gestures, God's hand reaching out from the infinite to create the mortal creature, who is not yet mortal but bounded by the inevitable facillty of his sin. Here, in the center of the poem, the soul rises, but finally that rising is only a sigh, a sigh towards heaven. "Soupire" holds the great weight of sadness, borne out by the white dashes of clouds in the blue sky, borne out in the irony of the faithful fountain that continues its duties, according to the laws of nature, when by those same laws, seemingly, man must fall, and cannot find the positive force he seeks even in the loved one, who errs, and whose dress is crimson, that deceiving Eve of the red apple -- the poetic rising of the soul must lapse into the purely sexual rush of the blood into upward erection.

This tender sadness is the tender October, the beautiful month, the month easily imagined for Keat's sonnet, and still the sky is a burning blue; but it is pale, fragile, and this whiteness now reminds us of the imminent snow.

Here the poem turns.

Because this sadness, this human grasping at the infinite, this is pure -- this is the purity of the soul moving, this is the motion, and the sadness is captured in all of the images but static, and overcome in this headlong rush, embodying grief but beyond it. This is a "langeur" but a "langeur infinie", rolling along on limp L's, gurgling into the R, but stretching even into the limpid clearness of the I like the sky.

We must judge the poem by its aim, and it is this aim, transcending the dead water and the savage wildness of the agony of "feuilles", an agony of both the falling leaves and of dying poetry, the double death of the white, unfilled page and the page that is already filled and is lifeless in the limp hand that produced it, it is this aim that, while it might blow with the cold october winds, portending winter, portending the ultimate death, portending the cold furrows of nothingness, still, in digging this furrow, still, in rising, drags along with it "le soleil jaune d'un long rayon" -- this arrow-streak of beauty, of light, of life, fills the gaps of emptiness, fills the scarlet blotch of sin embodied in Eden's fall, leaps above its source, and, in leaping, transcends its very self and overcomes the white death of the empty page, even as it springs from it and must fall back into that emptiness; poetry is a kind of arc, a jump through the nothing, an echo in the vast reaches, the void of eternity.