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All alone,
Whether summer rocks it, whether winter shakes it,
Whether its trunk be frosted or its branches green,
Always, through days of tenderness or hatred,
It imposes its enormous and sovereign life
Upon the plains.
It has seen the same fields for a hundred and a hundred years
And the same plowing and the same sowing;
The eyes today dead, the eyes
Of grandmothers and grandfathers
Have watched, stitch by stitch,
Its bark and its rough branches knot together.
It presided calm and strong over their labors;
Its hairy foot prepared for them a bed of moss;
It sheltered their nap at the noon hour
And its shadow was gentle
To those of their children who loved each other long ago.
From morning on, in the villages,
By whether it sings or weeps, they forecast the weather;
It is in the secret of the violent clouds
And of the sun that sulks on latent horizons;
It is all the past standing on the sad fields,
But whatever the memories
That, in its wood, persist,
As soon as January has just ended
And the sap, in its old trunk, flows,
With all its buds, with all its branches,
– Mad lips and twisted arms –
It throws a cry immensely stretched
Toward the future.
Then, with rays of rain and light,
It brushes the buds of its first leaves,
It contracts its knots, it smooths its branches;
It assails the sky, with a forehead always higher;
It projects so far its porous roots
That it exhausts the pond and the neighboring lands
And that sometimes it stops, as if astonished
By its mute, deep, and relentless work.
But to bloom and reign in its strength,
Oh the struggles it had to endure, winter!
Swords of wind through its bark.
Cries of hurricane, rages of the air,
Frosts like some harsh filings,
All hatred and all battle,
And the hails of the East and the snows of the North,
And the bleak and white frost whose tooth bites,
Down to the sapwood, the ample skein of fibers,
All was for it an evil that twists, a pain that vibrates,
Without ever yet
A single instant
Its energy slowing
To firmly will that its enlarged life
Be more beautiful, each spring.
In October, when gold triumphs in its foliage,
My steps still broad, though heavy and weary,
Often have directed their long pilgrimage
Toward this tree of autumn and wind passed through.
Like a giant brazier of leaves and flames,
It stood, superbly, under the blue sky,
It seemed inhabited by a million souls
That gently sang in its hollow branches.
I went toward it with eyes filled by light,
I touched it, with my fingers, with my hands,
I felt it move to the depths of the earth
From an enormous and superhuman movement;
And I pressed my brutal chest against it,
With such love, such fervor,
That its deep rhythm and its total force
Passed into me and penetrated to my heart.
Then, I was mingled with its beautiful ample life;
I felt powerful like one of its branches;
It stood, in splendor, as an example;
I loved more ardently the soil, the woods, the waters,
The immense and bare plain where the clouds pass;
I was armed with firmness against fate,
My arms would have wanted to hold space within them;
My muscles and my nerves made my body light
And I cried: “” Strength is holy.
Man must imprint his mark
Tranquilly, on his bold designs:
She is the one who holds the keys of paradises
And whose broad fist turns their doors “”.
And I kissed the knotty trunk, madly,
And when evening detached itself from the firmament,
I lost myself, in the dead countryside,
Walking straight ahead, toward no matter where,
With cries sprung from the depths of my mad heart.
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-tree-emile-verhaeren/