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Sinai! Sinai! what a night upon your summit!
What lightnings on your slopes dazzle the eyes!
The black vapors of the abyss
Roll their waves in bloody folds across your skies!
The enflamed cloud
Where your brow is lost
Vomits smoke
Like a green thatch;
The sky from which escapes
Flash upon flash,
And like iron
Struck by the hammer,
Casting blow upon blow,
Night, light,
Veils itself or grows bright,
Opens or contracts,
Like the eyelid
Of a man in wrath!
A man, a man alone climbs your grumbling slopes,
In vain your thousand echoes thunder and reply,
His steady gaze does not turn away!
A whole frantic people watches him from below;
To the places where your summit and the sky merge,
He climbs, and the storm wraps his steps!
The cloud bursts;
Its burning bolt
Springs like a blade
Drawn from its sheath!
The lightnings carried
On its moving folds,
Cast at random
By the four winds,
Striking one another,
Dart in every direction,
Like a flight
Of hardened eaglets
By a sound of melee
Suddenly surprised,
Who, beating their wings,
Fly pell-mell
Around their nests,
And far from their mother,
With death in their talons,
Dart from the eyrie
Uttering cries!
The cedar catches fire,
Cries out, bursts, crushes
Its burning base
Beneath its smoking arms!
The flame in a column
Rises, whirls,
Falls back and boils
In foaming fires;
The lava serpentines,
And from slope to slope
Spreads its hearth;
The burning mountain
Seems to undulate;
The firmament doubles
The fires with which it shines;
Every gaze is troubled,
All dies or all flees;
And the air that ignites,
Folding the flame
Around the high place,
Goes from place to place
Where the wind drives it,
Sowing through space
Shreds of fire!
Beneath that burning curtain that veils and lights him,
Moses alone, living, has dared to bury himself;
What gaze will fathom this terrible mystery?
Between man and fire what is to be accomplished?
Dispel, vain mortals, the dread that casts you down!
It is Jehovah who comes forth! He descends amid
The storms and the thunder!
It is God choosing His people on the earth,
It is a people on its knees acknowledging its God!
The Indian, raising his soul
To the vaults of his azure sky,
Worships the eternal flame
Taken from his purest hearth;
At the first ray of dawn,
He bows, he sings, he adores
The star from which day streams;
And in the evening, his sad eyelid
Over the tomb of light
Weeps with tears of love!
On the shores that the Nile floods,
The credulous child of the deserts,
Burned by the torch of the world,
Worships a gentler firmament.
Lover of his solitary nights,
For his cult fond of mysteries,
He awaits the shadow in the skies,
And from the heart of arid sands
He raises pyramids
To count his gods from closer by.
Greece worships the beautiful dreams
Invented by her gentle genius;
And her mysterious lies,
Shadows full of truths!
Beneath her fertile breath are born
As many gods as the human soul
Has terrors and desires;
Her genius, in love with idols,
Gives being to all symbols,
Creates a god for every sigh!
Sahara! on your dusty waves
Where from the four corners of the air
Go your caravans more numerous
Than the sands of your deserts?
It is the blind child of the prophet,
Who goes seven times to strike his head
Against the threshold of his holy place!
The desert in vain rises up,
Beneath the storm or beneath the blade:
Let us die, he says, God alone is God!
Beneath the green willows of the Euphrates,
What does this exiled people weep for?
It is not ungrateful Judea,
The dried-up wells of Siloam!
It is the worship of its ancestors!
Its ark, its temple, its priests,
Its God who forgets it today!
His name is in all its canticles;
And its melancholy harps
Remember only Him!
They still remember Him,
Now that of nations
This people exiled from the dawn
Endures the mockeries!
In vain, weary of proscribing it,
The stranger with a bitter smile
Pursues its credulous children;
Like water drinking this offense,
This people drags along a hope
Stronger than its two thousand years!
The savage child of the savannas,
Formless sketch of humans,
Before raising his huts,
Fashions himself a god with his hands;
If, driven from the banks of the river
Where the bear, where the tiger drink,
He emigrates under other skies,
Loaded with his tutelary gods:
Let us march, he says, bones of our fathers,
The homeland is where the gods are!
And of what do you speak, marbles, bronzes, porticoes,
Columns of Palmyra or of Persepolis?
Pantheons buried under ash or wave,
So empty now, once so filled!
And you, whose symbolic letters we seek,
Uncertain relics of a past without memory,
Mysteries of an old world written in mysteries?
And you, temples standing, superb basilicas,
Whose sanctuaries a divine breath animates?
You speak to us of gods! of gods! of gods still!
Each altar bears one, which a holy delirium adores,
Eternal holocaust that every place seems to offer.
Man and the elements, full of this single mystery,
Have had but one thought, one work on the earth:
To confess this being and to die!
But if man, occupied with this supreme work,
Exhausts every tongue to name the only Great One,
Ah! how much nature, in its very silence,
Names Him better still to the heart that understands Him!
Do you wish, O mortals, that this God proclaim Himself?
Tread underfoot the ash where the Pantheon sleeps
And the book where pride spells out His name in vain!
From the morning star the palest ray
On this divine mystery enlightens your soul more
Than the false-day lamp that keeps watch with Plato.
Climb to those heights from which rivers descend
And whose golden feet the azure seas bathe,
At the hour when the rays spread over their slopes,
Like a soaked net dripping over the meadows!
When all around you will be splendor and joy,
When the tepid webs of the midday hours,
Wrapping you like a mantle of silk,
Will make your cooled blood bloom!
When the earth exhaling its balsamic soul
With its vital perfume will intoxicate your senses,
And when even the insect, intoning its canticle,
Will buzz with love on the budding shoots!
When your gazes drowned in a vague atmosphere,
Like the dolphin in its native azure,
Float uncertain between the wave and the land,
And from sapphire skies and crystal seas,
Listen within your senses, listen within your soul
And in the pure ray that has shone on you from above!
And say whether the name that this hymn proclaims
Is not as living, as divine as it?
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-jehovah-or-the-idea-of-god-alphonse-de-lamartine/