To the Monks

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

Monks come to us from gothic horizons,
But whose soul, whose spirit dies of tomorrow,
Who banish love into your mystic gardens
To purify it of all human pride,
Firm, you advance along the roads of men,
Your eyes hallucinated by the fires of hell,
From distant times to the day we now live,
In ages of silver and centuries of iron,
Always with the same sacerdotal and broad step.
Alone you survive, great, in the dead Christian world,
Alone, without bending your backs, you bear its burden
Like a royal corpse at the bottom of a golden coffin.
Monks—oh! the seekers of sublime chimeras,
Your cries of eternity pass through the tombs,
Your spirit is haunted by the glow of peaks,
You are the bearers of crosses and torches
Around the divine ideal that is being buried.

Oh! the vanquished monks, haughty, silent,
Oh! the giants standing on the noises of the earth,
Who listen only to the sole sound the heavens make,
Monks grown among exile and defeats,
Monks driven out, but whose vermilion garments
Illuminate the night of the world, and whose heads
Pass through the brightness of supreme suns,
We magnify you, we the calm poets.
And since nothing proud is today victorious,
Since the palms have been beaten down toward the mire,
Monks, great isolated ones in thought and heart,
Before the last soul is killed,
My verses will build you mystic altars
Under the wandering velum of a chaste cloud,
So that one day this soul with eternal desires,
Pensive and alone and sad in the depths of the pale night,
From your extinguished glory may still light the fire,
And still dream of you when the last blasphemy
Like an immense sword will have pierced God!

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-to-the-monks-emile-verhaeren/