The prayer of death for the dead

From the ages, as they tremble, the centuries pass away With the goods of the seasons, they pass without compassion, And death then passed but without knocking at the door That hid the treasure and in secret transports it; Life! O death! The hand that directs your hand, Weary of striking, will it tomorrow demand of you To suspend your blows? Does your unrestrained hunger Still wish to disturb the banquet of life? But, if you come without ceasing, at any hour of the day, To seek dead ones in us for your dwelling, The Universe is so little to your bottomless abysses, Or bottomless is your chaos to such cruel sadisms. O death! You see the virgin weep without weeping, And the withered flowers you that were to adorn her, Without allowing her brow to gird the crown Of roses and of lilies that the bridegroom gave her with a smile. You do not heed, O death! the cry of the child, Whom, pitiless, you come to strike without hope Of letting it know its very own mother Whom heaven gave to it in giving it the earth at birth. You do not heed, O death! this old man who in life Implores of you a favor, at the hour of departure, To embrace his son and to bless his daughter, That he may sleep tranquil before the ceasing of life. But, cruel one! tell me, do the dead come to be Those who leave from here to reach other shores? Will they thus suffer always the torments of the Earth In full eternity, and prayer, what it encloses, Could it not at last sweeten for them one day? And death replied: In the somber abode Where, free, I installed my shadowy empire, Prayer is powerful and it is God who earnestly inspires it In those delivered to me. In the evening, upon returning, Upon my bloody throne in pomp I go to sit, I gaze at the vastness of the heavens and I am the first For my dead to recite the prayer entire. Listen, child, listen: "O God omnipotent, There from the heavens upon me, upon them, cast in mercy Your pious gaze. May a ray of hope Illuminate the places where pain overtakes us. Make us see, O God! the land of pardon, That shore without end, that vast expanse, Of the elect of the earth, that is, the eternal homeland Where for all you created everlasting life; Make each one of us, before your will, Bow with respect; in the face of the majesty Of your designs, then, prostrate, adore you; Bow before your name, and rising still, pray, Exclaiming: Lord! If you have banished me From the earthly abode, thus you have punished me In the dead's recess, I can confess To have deserved more; strike me without ceasing, Lord, and I shall suffer without veiled murmur, And my eyes will never have wept so well To wash away entirely the somber stain That in the present always shamefully clings. Your blows I shall have, I shall bear my cross Without ever cursing the trial I deserved, And when you give an end to my just trial, If you give, Lord, to the being who is renewed, The goods he lost in the bitter solitude, The pure air, the breeze, the sun, liberty itself, To have repose and peace before you, Lord, I pledge myself to pray for myself and on behalf Of my poor brothers under the almost eternal weight Of a suffering that holds them prisoners to their own hell; To their shadows, then, on the other side weeping, Mine thus says to them, then, as it departs: Courage, my brothers, you who remain here, I shall fulfill in the heavens, what I promised you." Casimir Delavigne. n We have already published other excerpts of poems obtained through this medium, in the numbers of June and July, under the titles of To your book and The prayer for the Spirits. Mr. Vavasseur is a versifying medium in the proper sense of the word, because only very rarely does he obtain communications in prose and, although very learned and acquainted with the rules of poetry, he never of himself composed verses. But, it will be said, what do you know about it, and who tells you that what you suppose to be obtained mediumistically is not the product of his personal composition? We believe it, first because he affirms it and because we hold him to be incapable of lying; second, because mediumship, being in him completely disinterested, would have no reason to give itself to a useless effort and to play out a comedy unworthy of an honorable character. No doubt the thing would be more evident and, above all, more extraordinary if he were completely illiterate, as is seen in certain mediums, but the knowledge he possesses would not invalidate his faculty, once it is demonstrated by other proofs. Let them explain why, for example, if he wishes to compose something of himself, a simple sonnet, he obtains nothing, whereas, without seeking it, and without premeditated design, he writes pieces of great breath, in one jet, more rapidly and more fluently than one would write prose, on an improvised subject, of which he was not thinking? What poet is capable of such a feat, which repeats itself almost daily? We could not doubt it, because the pieces we cite, and many others, were written before our eyes, in the Society and in different groups, in the presence of an assembly often numerous. Let all the jugglers, who claim to discover the alleged strings of the mediums, by imitating more or less grossly some physical effects, come, then, to vie with certain writing mediums and undertake, even in simple prose, instantaneously, without preparation or retouching, the first subject that arises and the most abstract questions! It is a test to which no detractor has yet been willing to submit himself. Incidentally, we recall that, six or seven years ago, a writer and journalist, whose name sometimes figures in the press among the scoffers of Spiritism, came to seek us out, presenting himself as an intuitive medium and offering his cooperation to the Society. We told him that, before accepting his obliging offer, we needed to know the extent and the nature of his faculty; in consequence, we summoned him to a private trial session, in which four or five mediums were present. As soon as these took up the pencil, they began to write with such rapidity that it left him stupefied; he scribbled three or four lines with strong erasures, alleged a headache, which disturbed his faculty. He promised to return and we saw him no more. As it seems, the Spirits assist him only with a fresh head and in his study. It is true that improvisers have been seen, like the late Eugène de Pradel [Pierre-Marie-Michel-Eugène Coutray, viscount of Pradel], captivating the listeners by their naturalness. People were astonished that they had published nothing. The reason is very simple: it is that what seduced the hearing was not bearable in reading; it was merely an arrangement of words issuing from an abundant source, in which, exceptionally, a few witty traits shone, but whose whole was empty of serious and profound thoughts, and strewn with revolting incorrectnesses. We do not refer to the censure that may be made of the verses, although obtained with almost as much rapidity as the verbal improvisations. If they were the fruit of a personal labor, it would be a singular humility on the part of the author to attribute the merit to others, and not to himself, depriving himself of the honor he could thereby draw from it. Despite Mr. Vavasseur's mediumship being recent, he already possesses a quite important collection of poems of real value, which he intends to publish. We shall hasten to announce that work as soon as it appears, for we have no doubt that it will be read with interest. [1]

[v. Casimir Delavigne.]