With Thoughts And With Images Poem by Peter Mamara

by M. Eminescu (1850-1889)

I've blackened so many pages
With thoughts and with images,
From the pages of my book, and of my days
— Right from the start of my adolescence.

Don't follow my way
Since it is full of blunders
Scattered through the darkness,
On the illusory dream-path of my life.

My fantasy without form,
Doesn't have principles and norm.
Oh my, it got lost on its way
My thought is blank. My verses limp.

And ideas that it fills in this way
Burn in my head, hit under my temples.
I've given them such rich attire
But my poems are uncalled for.

They look like mongrels,
Like Egyptian pyramids.
They look like a stone sarcophagus
With its old symbols on a mountaintop…

And long alleys with sphinxes,
Propylaea and monoliths,
They make one believe that behind the entrance
It is an entire realm of the dead.

You enter into one, climb up the steps.
You don't even know what waits there.
A solitary king rests in peace
There, under a torch, in a resting place.

(1876)

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