Jan Schreiber ~ Brookline Poet Laureate 2015-17
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  • Shakespeare et al.
    • Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
    • Fulke Greville (1554-1628)
    • William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
    • Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
    • John Donne (1572-1631)
    • George Herbert (1593-1633)
  • 20th Century Poems
    • William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
    • Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
    • Robert Frost (1874-1963)
    • Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
    • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
    • Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
    • Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
    • W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
    • Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
    • Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
    • Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
    • Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
    • Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
  • Poems in Translation
    • Bai Juyi (772–846)
    • J. W. von Goethe (1749-1832)
    • Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
    • Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
    • Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
    • Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
    • Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)
    • Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
  • Poems by Jan Schreiber
    • Acoustics
    • Now Winter Nights Enlarge
    • A Little Patter
    • The Inventory
    • Cormorants
    • The Road to Nowhere
    • The Birds
  • Contact
Picture
S T É P H A N E   M A L L A R M É  (1842-1898)

The Swan

Virginal, vital, beautiful today,
how can a drunken wing-beat tear away
this hard forgotten lake encased in ice,
haunted by limpid bergs of fictive flights!
A swan of other days now calls to mind,
magnificent but hopelessly resigned,
its failure once to sing from winter’s places
alive in sterile but resplendent stasis.
Its neck shakes off white agony conferred
by space upon the all-denying bird,
but not the awful earth that grips its wing.
A phantom trapped by brilliance in this stream,
it’s frozen in the cold and scornful dream
the Swan shapes from its futile banishing.


                                 Translated by Jan Schreiber

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