Looks of Eyes

O these looks of poor, tired eyes!
And yours and mine!
And those that are no more and those that shall be!
And those that never shall arrive and those that notwithstanding
do exist!
Some seem to be visiting the poor on a Sunday;
Some are like sick people with no home;
Some are like lambs in a meadow covered with linen.
And these unusual looks!
There are some under whose vault are people watching
the execution of a virgin in a closed room,
And some that make one think of unknown melancholies!
Of peasants at the windows of a factory,
Of a gardener who has turned weaver,
Of a summer afternoon in a museum of waxen images,
Of the thoughts of a queen who watches a sick man in
the garden,
Of an odour of camphor in the forest,
Of shutting a princess up in a tower, some festal day,
Of sailing for a whole week on a warm canal.
Pity all those who come out with short steps like convalescents
at harvest time!
Pity all those who look like children gone astray at
meal-time!
Pity the eyes of the wounded man who looks up at the
surgeon,
His looks like tents under the storm!
Pity the looks of the tempted virgin!
(O! rivers of milk are going to flee in the darkness!
And the swans are dead amid the serpents!)
And the looks of the virgin who succumbs!
Princesses abandoned in swamps without an issue!
And these eyes wherein vessels in full sail vanish lit by
the tempest!
And the pity of all these looks which suffer with not
being otherwhere!
And all the sufferings indistinct and yet diverse!
And these that never any one will understand!
And these poor looks nigh mute!
And these poor looks that whisper!
And these poor stifled looks!

Here in our midst one thinks one is in a castle which
serves as a hospital!
And so many others look like tents, lilies of war, on the
convent's narrow lawn!
And so many others look like wounded men being
tended in a hot-house!
And so many others look like a sister of charity on an
ocean liner where there are no sick!

O! to have seen all these looks!
To have taken all these looks into oneself!
And to have exhausted mine in meeting them!
And henceforth not to be able any more to close my
eyes!