Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
Roll on in your paths of flame,
Stars, kings of immensity!
Insult, crush my soul
By your almost eternity!
And you, wandering comets,
Of the divine ocean of worlds
Prodigious overflow,
Leave the traced limits,
And reveal other thoughts
Of the one who thought the heavens!
Triumph, immortal nature!
To whom the hand full of days
Lends forces without measure,
Times that are always reborn!
Death re-tempers your power,
Gives, carries off, returns existence
To all that draws it from you;
Insect hatched from your smile,
I am born, I look and I expire,
Walk and think no more of me!
Old ocean, on your shores
Floats like a foaming sky,
More stormy than the clouds,
More luminous than a firmament!
While empires are born,
Grow, fall, disappear
With their generations,
Raise your boiling crests,
Beat your shore! and say to the tempests:
Where are the nests of nations?
You who are not weary of hatching
Since the birth of days.
Arise, radiant dawn,
Lie down, arise always!
Reflect his sublime fires,
Dazzling snows of the peaks,
Where the day descends like a king!
Shine, shine to confound me,
You whom a ray of day can melt,
You will last longer than I!
And you who lower and raise yourself
Like the dust of the roads,
Like the waves on the shore,
Innumerable race of humans,
Survive the time that consumes me,
Swallow me in your foam,
I myself feel my nothingness,
In your breast what is a life?
What is a drop of rain
In the basins of the ocean!
You die to be reborn again,
You swarm in your furrows!
A breath of evening at dawn
Renews your whirlwinds!
An vanished existence
Does not make the flow of being, always full,
Fall by one life;
It misses you no more when I expire
Than to the man who breathes
Is missing a breath from his breast!
You will sweep away my ashes;
Man or insect will be reborn from it!
My name burning to spread
In the common name will be lost;
It was! that is all! soon even
Oblivion covers this supreme word,
A century or two will have conquered it!
But you cannot, O nature!
Erase a creature;
I die! what does it matter? I have lived!
God has seen me! the glance of life
Has lowered itself upon my nothingness,
Your rejuvenated existence
Has centuries, I had my moment!
But in the minute that passes
The infinity of time and space
In my gaze has repeated itself!
And I have seen in this point of being
The same image appear to me
That you in your immensity!
Incommensurable distances,
Abysses of mountains and heavens,
Your inexhaustible mysteries
Have revealed themselves to my eyes!
I have rolled in my sublime vows
More waves than your abysses
Roll, in angry sea!
And you, suns with eyes of flame,
The burning gaze of my soul
Has risen higher than you!
Of the universal, unique being,
The splendor in my shadow has shone,
And I have hummed my canticle
Of joy and love before him!
And his radiant thought
In mine has been retraced,
And his word has known me!
And I have ascended before his face,
And nature has said to me: Pass:
Your fate is sublime, he has seen you!
So live your days without measure!
Earth and sky! celestial torch!
Mountains, seas, and you, nature,
Smile long upon my tomb!
Erased from the book of life,
May even nothingness forget me!
I admire and am not jealous!
My thought has lived in advance
And dies with a hope
More imperishable than you!
Alphonse de Lamartine
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-eternity-of-nature-brevity-of-man-alphonse-de-lamartine/