“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame . . .” In Hopkins’s poem, this bird catching fire blazes as would a small, blue and orange stained-glass window in a church; like anything in that world, like man himself, like Christ, the bird asserts his being in an orderly cosmos.

How this flame, this trust, these certainties guide the spirit up and outward! And how in turn words heard in the cold sweep you up, enflame you—if for only as long as your reading lasts—and from afar!

Yet the glimpsed bird, the same one that also blazed blue and orange on the bank of the stream hidden behind ivory-colored reeds and willows (into whose shelter it vanished almost as soon), was nothing that could be likened to Christ; it was not a part of a stained-glass window in a cathedral in which I might have prayed, not even an angel who might have brought me a message; it was merely a bird, fiercely unsociable as they nearly all are, yet more colorful, more brightly shimmering than those normally seen here, and it was only the second time that I had come across it like that in its realm among the reeds and willows; and the little boy who was accompanying us on that November walk (which was a little too long to his liking) had not even spotted it, despite his quick clear eyesight.

Was it as if I had reopened once again The Thousand and One Nights of my childhood to the page where Aladdin’s mother is depicted as bearing to the sovereign a bowlful of fruit, each piece of which is in fact a gem? Or as if this bird had escaped from some Middle Eastern aviary and flown all the way to the banks of a familiar stream, wearing on its plumage a metallic blue and a radiant orange such as were once displayed, in times long past, by kings, priests, and princesses, and such as can never be forgotten once you have seen those colors sparkling on the walls of the churches of Ravenna?

A seemingly unbound bird. A blue and orange jewel almost as rare as those relics for which reliquaries are half-opened only on certain feast days.
No one, however, has ever been required to venerate it; and indeed, if it were caged up anywhere, it would lose its shine.
A close relative of those half-heard words that you are never sure of having understood, yet that you never forget.
Things that you need to leave to the reeds, to the willows.
Things that speak to you without wishing to speak to you, that have not the slightest concern for you, that no god could turn into his messengers.
Brilliant fragments of the world, on fire here or there.
Per pale blue and orange, per pale sun and night, as on a coat of arms.
Or a very tender gaze—fire and night—alighting on you for a moment. For the very last time.
A lucky day in November, when a kingfisher caught fire in the willows.
Isn’t having a second life perhaps less important than seeing it again once it has vanished?
A bird not to be hunted or trapped, and whose blaze burns out in the cage of words.
Once would suffice, but for what? To say what?
A single feathery flash
to give you the impression that death is not death?
Hunter, do not aim: this bird is not wild game.
Look, do not aim: gather only the flash of feathers among the reeds and willows.
Uniting sun and sleep in its feathers.
I remember that you do not like jewels all that much.
But a winged jewel, a jewel with a heart?
A fierce, perhaps mocking flash, as some looks used to be?
The kingfisher blazes in the willows.
It blazed.
And if something like that sufficed to lead you out of the grave even before you had been laid down in it?

Now, at night, I remember that lucky November day and the bird-flame glimpsed between the straw-colored reeds and the waters that they concealed; barely a blaze, and it was gone. This image came back to me after I had lain down during one of those opaque nights that is not merely night, which can also sometimes enclose, encage, and suffocate, and which is so unending for those who end up viewing it exclusively as a foreshadowing of death. I had awakened without really knowing why, and once again I saw the bird that was only a bird, the willows that were only willows, as well as all of us strollers and the disappointed child whom we had had to take home without our even spotting the stream on which he would have launched his wooden fleet. I then said to myself (was it under cover of darkness?) that all the same, all the same, those things that I had glimpsed for a moment, and I who had glimpsed them with wonder, all those things—even if they were apparently no longer ordered by any architecture in which we could have assigned them each a place, thus recovering the jubilation of faith—were still perhaps something else than merely themselves (including ourselves, and the child, who was so free and trusting); not only former mud and future dust; not only matter that would rot, future ashes, future nothingness. But something else. What, then? I will never know, supposing that I do not immediately abandon such a dream.

Thus, during that night, and perhaps thanks to a night that no longer appeared opaque and definitive this time, I also told myself that, despite everything, it must have been the bird that had enabled me to see the whole scene otherwise, to experience it otherwise: as when, in a fire that you thought was about to go out, a final flame bursts up and lights a corner of the room, or the fields, revealing them to be utterly different than what we had believed them to be.

Translated from the French by John Taylor