(In Le Misanthrope Alceste, having become disgusted with all forms and manners of society, goes off into exile, leaving behind Philinte, who shall now become his rival in love.)
Evening is clogged with gnats as the light fails,
And branches bloom with gold and copper screams
Of birds with fancy prices on their tails
To plume a lady’s gear; the motet wails
Through Africa upon dissimilar themes.
A little snuff-box whereon Daphnis sings
In pale enamels, touching love’s defeat,
Calls up the color of her underthings
And plays upon the taut memorial strings,
Trailing her laces down into this heat.
One day he found, topped with a smutty grin,
The small corpse of a monkey, partly eaten.
Force of the sun had split the bluish skin,
Which, by their questioning and entering in,
A swarm of bees had been concerned to sweeten.
He could distill no essence out of this.
That yellow majesty and molten light
Should bless this carcass with a sticky kiss
Argued a brute and filthy emphasis.
The half-moons of the finger-nails were white,
And where the nostrils opened on the skies,
Issuing to the sinus, where the ant
Crawled swiftly down to undermine the eyes
Of cloudy aspic, nothing could diguise
How terribly the thing looked like Philinte.
Will-o’-the-wisp, on the scum laden water,
Burns in the night, a gaseous deceiver,
In the pale shade of France’s foremost daughter.
Heat gives his thinking cavity no quarter,
For he is burning with the monkey’s fever.
Before the bees have diagramed their comb
Within the skull, before summer has cracked
The back of Daphnis, naked, polychrome,
Paris shall see the tempered exile home,
Peruked and stately for the final act.
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