The One of Nothing

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

I am the one of grandiose putrefactions
Who comes back from the soft land of the dead;
The one of the black Wests of fate
Who shows you, over there, like an apotheosis,
His immense island, where garlands,
Of detritus and meats
Hang,
While, among the sumptuous flowers of evenings,
The great golden eyes of black toads open.

Swollen grounds and nocturnal caverns,
Oh! my grottoes gaping boredom through the crevices
Of chasms and morasses!
On my leprous trees, by the ponds,
Dry your heart and your baroque cloaks,
Old Lear; and then here is the strange black Hamlet
And the crows courting his corpse;
Here is René, forehead split, flesh chilled,
And Ophelia’s hands, at the edge of harbors,
Are those two white flowers – moldy.

And murders make me plans of rot,
Up to the palace from which dictatorships impose themselves
Of my land of purulence and golden blood.

There lie the carcasses of nocturnal emperors;
The mad Neros and the taciturn Tibers,
Lying on terraces of portor.
Their skull is hairy with worms – and their thought
That tore ancient Rome into fires
Still ferments, in their decomposed head.
Lemures suck the pustules of the belly
That was Vitellius – and ills and diseases
Burst, on these debris their pouches of poisons.

I am the one of the soft land of the dead…

And then here are those who exalted themselves in God;
Here are the hearts burned with faith, those whose fire
Astonished the suns, with its new gleam:
Loves sanctified by ecstatic ardor
“Nothing for oneself and on the world, where tangle
Lust, pride, avarice, horror,
All sins, to inaugurate, torrential
Of sacrifice and supreme goodness, a heaven!
And the Flamels fallen from Gothic legends,
And the white misers who eat their fingers,
And the warriors in immobile gold, the cross
Sparks with ardor their mystic breastplates,
And their wives whose gazes were so sweet;
Here – bloody and raw – they are there, all.

I am the one of mephitic putrefactions,

In a garden of shadow and evening,
I cultivate on a black espalier,
Promises and hopes.
Disease? she is, here, the venomous
And triumphant reaper
Whose sickle is a crescent of fever
Carved in the Hecate of old Sabbaths.
The freshness of childhood and the health of lips,
The cries of joy and the ingenuous din
Of leaps whipped by wind, among the plains,
I wither them, ferociously, under my breaths,
And here they are, at the corners of my quincunxes
In yellow heaps, like leaves and brambles.

I am the one of sovereign putrefactions.

Here are the thirsters for the wines of beauty;
The crazed ones of the unanimous voluptuousness
That gave birth to Venus from the entire sea;
Here are their flanks, with the holes of their misery;
Their eyes, with blood; their hands, with golds;
Their livid phalluses twisted with efforts
Broken – and, through the ponds of the plain,
The old clots drowned of human seed.
Here are those whose horror was to seek each other
Around the red dread of their sin,
Those who licked themselves, like lionesses –
Tongues of stone – and who fled to return
Always pale, toward their implacable desire,
Fixed, over there, in the evening, in the eyes of the moon.
All and all – look – one by one, one by one,
They are, in ash and horror
Changed – and their ruin is the splendor
Of my domain, at the edge of phosphorescent seas.

I am the one of incessant putrefactions.
I am the one of infinite putrefactions;
Vice or virtue, valor or fear, blasphemy or faith,
In my land of gall and gold, I am its law.
And I bring to you this multiple torch
Dream, madness, ardor, lie and irony
And my laughter before the universal tomb.

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-the-one-of-nothing-emile-verhaeren/