matt's poetry pocketbook:
poems and poets

Coup de foudre

Jules Laforgue

I am in love, I am in love: I have drunk a good dizzying gulp.  I with an analytical mind and a shortsighted soul now feel completely solemn . . . And I walk along the streets.  The Luxembourg Gardens are flooded with a great gaiety of bells.  If she doesn't love me, if she can't be wholly mine, what difference will it make?  I am in love, that's enough; I feel generous, holy, human, trembling, so filled with things that I dare not look myself in the eye . . . No joking, I really mean all that I say.

Coup de foudre means thunderbolt; translation William Jay Smith