“When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!”

— Stéphane Mallarmé

Nurse.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!
No sunset, but the red awakening
Of the last day concluding everything
Struggles so sadly that time disappears,
The redness of apocalypse, whose tears
Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud
Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud
For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away
From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway
Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine
Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!

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Stéphane Mallarmé 36

French Symbolist poet 1842–1898

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