I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that,
I have in me all the dreams in the world.

The feelings that hurt most,
the emotions that sting most,
are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things,
precisely because they are impossible;
nostalgia for what never was;
the desire for what could have been;
regret over not being someone else;
dissatisfaction with the world’s existence.
All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape,
an eternal sunset of what we are.

Cleopatra lies dead in the shade.
It rains.

The ship was dressed with the wrong flags.
It continues to rain.

Why do you gaze at the distant city?
Your soul is the distant city.
It rains a chill rain.

And as for the mother who rocks a dead child in her arms --
We all rock a dead child in our arms.
It rains, it rains.

I see the sad smile left on your weary lips
In the way your finger won't let go of your rings.
Why does it rain?

I devote my higher mind to the ardent
Pursuit of the summit, leaving
Verse to chance and its laws,
For when the thought is lofty and noble,
The sentence will naturally seek it,
And rhythm slavishly serve it.

I'm unable to feel, to be human, to reach out
From inside my sad soul to my fellow earthly brothers.
And even were I to feel, I'm unable to be useful, practical, quotidian, definite,
To have a place in life, a destiny among men,
To have a vocation, a force, a will, a garden,
A reason for resting, a need for recreation,
Something that comes to me directly from nature.

So be motherly to me, O tranquil night . . .
You who remove the world from the world, you who are peace,
You who don't exist, who are only the absence of light,
You who aren't a thing, a place, an essence or a life,
Penelope who weaves darkness that tomorrow will be unravelled,
Unreal Circe of the fevered, of the anguished without a cause,
Come to me, O night, reach out your hands,
And be coolness and relief, O night, on my forehead . . .