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– You who go off down there,
By all the roads of the earth,
Tenacious and solitary man,
Toward where are you going, you who go off?
– I love the wind, the air and space;
And I go off without knowing where,
With my fervent and mad heart,
In the air that shines and in the wind that passes.
– The wind is clear in the sun,
The wind is cool on the houses,
The wind bends, with its vermilion arms,
From one end of the horizons to the other,
The red flowers and the tawny harvests.
– The South, the West, the East, the North,
With their palms of gold,
With their fists of ice,
Toss back and forth the passing wind.
– Here it comes from the seas of Naples and Messina
Whose waves the gesture of the gods illumined;
It has hollowed the old deserts where are outlined
The white festoons of sand around the green islets.
Its breath is weary, its exhalation timid,
The grass barely bends on the slopes of the ditch;
It has touched, however, the brow of the pyramids
And the great sphinx has seen it pass.
– The season changes, and slowly the wind exhumes itself
Clothed in immense rain and in tatters of mist.
– Here it comes toward us from pallid horizons,
England, Jersey, Brittany, Scotland, Ireland,
Where November suspends the torpid garlands
Of its drowned stars, in pale fogs;
It has set out, the wind without joy and without light:
Like a blind man, it wanders far off over the ocean
And, as soon as it touches a cape or strikes a stone,
The abyss raises a giant cry.
– Spring, when you appear on the deserted plains,
The cold wind still chaps your green beauty.
– Here it comes from the long lands where Moscow shines,
Where the Kremlin and its golden domes that move
Mirror and cast back to the sky the red suns;
The wind rears up ardent, rough, terrible and mad,
Bites the steppe, leaps from Ukraine to Germany,
Rolls over the heath with a brazen sound
And makes legends weep, beneath the mountains,
From grotto to grotto, along the Rhine.
– The wind, the wind during the lucid winter nights
Pales the skies and the distances like an acid.
– Here it comes from the Pole where tall white glaciers
Align their palaces of frost and silence;
Harsh, tranquil and continuous in its surges,
It sharpens the rocks like a bundle of lances;
Its flight reaches the Sunds and the desert Urals,
Lingers at the fjords of Swedes and Norwegians
And shakes, across the immensity of the seas,
All the feathers of the snow.
– From wherever the wind comes,
It brings back from its journeys,
Across the infinity of fields and villages,
One knows not what of healthy, clear and fervent.
With its lips of gold grazing the soil of the plains,
It has kissed human joy and sorrow
Everywhere;
Beautiful prides, old hopes, mad desires,
All that puts in the soul an immortal waiting,
It fanned with its four wings;
It carries within it like a great sacred heart
That beats, quivers, exults or weeps
And that it disperses, at the whim of seasons and hours,
Toward brandished happinesses or unknown griefs.
– If I love, admire and sing with madness
The wind,
And if I drink its fluid and living wine
To the dregs,
It is because it enlarges my whole being and because before
Infiltrating itself, through my lungs and through my pores,
Down to the blood that my body lives on,
With its rough strength or its deep gentleness,
Immensely it has embraced the world.
Emile Verhaeren
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-in-praise-of-the-wind-emile-verhaeren/