aragon on wonder and love

Good people, my information comes from heaven. The secrets of every soul, like the secrets of language and of love, are revealed to me nightly, and there are nights in broad daylight. When you pass near me your clothing flies off; you account books flip open to the page dissimulations and frauds; your alcove is unveiled, and your heart as well! Your heart like a butterfly-sphinx in the sun, your heart like a ship foundering on a reef, your heart like a compass crazed by a little piece of lead, like laundry drying in the wind, like the whinnying of horses, like millet thrown to birds, like a discarded evening paper. Your heart is a charade known to everyone. (69, Imagination's Speech)

Charming substitute, you are the synopsis of a world of wonders, of the natural world, and it is you who are reborn when I close my eyes. You are the wall and its breach. You are the horizon and the immediate presence. The ladder and the iron rungs. Total eclipse. Light. Miracle. And can anyone think of what isn’t miracle when miracle stands there in her nightdress?” Thus the universe gradually effaces itself for me; it melts away while from its depths the outline of an adorable ghost emerges, an immense female, pressing against me on all sides, in the stablest aspect of a waning world. O desire, twilight of forms, in the rays of this decline of life I seize myself like a prisoner at the bars of liberty, me the inmate of love, convict number…, and there follows a number too long for my mouth to memorize. (138, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont)
- Le Paysan de Paris