Desires
translated from the French by Jethro Bithell
What does she dream, lost in her hair’s cascade,
The lonely child with flowering hands as wan
As garlands pale?—Of the plains of days agone
With pools of water lilies, where she strayed
On paths of chance her hands with flowers arrayed,
And where alms welcomed her?—And never shone
As now her eyes her jewels braided on
Her gowns of gold and purple and brocade.
But she sees nothing round her. In the room
Amber and aromatics melt the gloom,
The dusk’s hot odour through the window streams;
As heavy as an opal’s changing fires,
Sigh in the evening mist and die desires,
While naked at her glass the maiden dreams.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 3, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
Jethro Bithell’s translation of “Desires” was published in Contemporary Belgian Poetry (The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911). In his introduction to the anthology, Bithell writes of Fontainas, “André Fontainas is a symbolist of the symbolists. [...] He is a romanticist, but in a new sense; for whereas the old romanticists turned from the sordid present to the motley middle ages and the choral pomp of Rome, Fontainas haunts the labyrinths of his soul, and projects his conscience beyond the bounds of space and time. In Fontainas, as in Gérardy, knights ride through pathless forests, but these are not the knights of Spenser. The Faëry Queen [sic] is a record of events in the outer world; Fontainas is a chevalier errant in the inner world of the spirit, and his castles are only settling-places for the dove of thought winging out of the unknown.”
André Fontainas
André Fontainas, born February 5, 1865, in Brussels, was a Belgian Symbolist poet and critic who published many collections of poetry, criticism, and fiction during his life. A founding member of the Académie Mallarmé, Fontainas died on December 8, 1948, in Paris.