Unconsciousness, Poem by Emile Verhaeren

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

The soul and heart so weary of days, so weary of voices,
So weary of nothing, so weary of all, the soul soiled;
When I am alone, in the evening, suddenly, sometimes,
I feel the white eye of madness weeping over me.

The one, so sad alas! who went away, over there,
– Pale disenchanted eye of wicked reason –
To dream of something, far off, that one does not see,
Of something far off that trembles and weeps and sings.

Gloomy toad crouched beneath the roses, all alone!
So alone! – gloomy toad, weeper of the moon, call out!
Call out! And you, little flowers, for the shroud
Of my brain, is the burier coming?

To be the wanderer in the world and the pauper of oneself,
With the moving fire of a soul, that flickers
Behind a frail hand and tosses its self about;
That flickers like a reflection tosses in water.

To pass unconscious and to make oneself the friend
Of what flies and crawls and flees, over there. Not long ago,
Before the sleeper emerged from sleep,
The first man, my kind were seen on earth.

Have love for them, have a little love!
They are the slow charmers, over there, of the slow breezes:
Their fingers, which have never touched the evil fire,
Dance distant airs, on trembling flutes:

The puerile and the vague ones, but far from evil,
And the gentle lost ones, through the green heather:
Hamlet would laugh perhaps, alas! but Parsifal?
O benign and clear Parsifal, would certainly understand!

Emile Verhaeren

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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