SpokenVerse | The Day of Gifts by Paul Claudel (read by Tom O'Bedlam) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded April 2012 | Updated October 2024, 6 hours ago.
"Claudel wrote in a unique verse style. He rejected traditional metrics in favour of long, luxuriant, unrhymed lines of free verse, the so-called verset claudelien, influenced by the Latin psalms of the Vulgate."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Claudel
Christopher Hitchens' essay, Love, Poverty, and War, quotes "In memory of WB Yeats" by W H Auden
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
It's often misquoted and misunderstood. The "him" referred to in the last line is Yeats, not Claudel.
I guess that Hitchens identified with this, hoping that time would pardon him too for writing well.
Franz Joseph on his deathbed, oil painting, 1916 by Franz von Matsch.
Little girl holding apples in her hands 1895 William Bouguereau
It's not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough.
Someday I'll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk.
And I' ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days,
And I'll see that I'm rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways.
I haven't lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon.
Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed off virtue's burden.
Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser.
If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard;
If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not suffice,
But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life,
Well then there's Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more!
But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore,
If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate,
Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face—
Well, anyway, You didn't come to save the just but the other type that abounds,
And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere . . . Lord, I'm still around.
And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn't held a little something back from You,
Hasn't in his free time fashioned something special for You,
Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him,
And maybe this little that he's made himself, kept back until then,
though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim.
It would be something that he'd put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed.
Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms
And offered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride,
A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands,
a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.
"Claudel wrote in a unique verse style. He rejected traditional metrics in favour of long, luxuriant, unrhymed lines of free verse, the so-called verset claudelien, influenced by the Latin psalms of the Vulgate."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Claudel
Christopher Hitchens' essay, Love, Poverty, and War, quotes "In memory of WB Yeats" by W H Auden
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
It's often misquoted and misunderstood. The "him" referred to in the last line is Yeats, not Claudel.
I guess that Hitchens identified with this, hoping that time would pardon him too for writing well.
Franz Joseph on his deathbed, oil painting, 1916 by Franz von Matsch.
Little girl holding apples in her hands 1895 William Bouguereau
It's not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough.
Someday I'll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk.
And I' ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days,
And I'll see that I'm rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways.
I haven't lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon.
Now I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed off virtue's burden.
Each day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser.
If what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard;
If there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not suffice,
But who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life,
Well then there's Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more!
But if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore,
If a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate,
Or the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face—
Well, anyway, You didn't come to save the just but the other type that abounds,
And if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere . . . Lord, I'm still around.
And what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn't held a little something back from You,
Hasn't in his free time fashioned something special for You,
Hoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him,
And maybe this little that he's made himself, kept back until then,
though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim.
It would be something that he'd put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed.
Just like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms
And offered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride,
A magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands,
a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.
