When life, like an immense bundle,
weighs over the weary soul
and the final grain of fragrant incense
floats exhausted before the last god;
when we taste, with intense eagerness,
of every bitter poisoned fruit,
and boredom, with a masked face,
interrupts our progress in the long road;
the great, lonely and pure soul
that the miserable reality scorns,
finds ignored happiness in the arts,
like the kingfisher, in cold dark nights,
seeks asylum on the moss-covered crag
that the blue sea floods with silvery waves
translated by Jose Wan García