The Forward Rush, Poem by Emile Verhaeren

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

My body bent over my window,
My nerves vibrant and resonant with noise,
I listen with my fever and absorb, into my being,
The thunder of trains that cross the night.
They are a fire fleeing through the void.
Their iron uproar, on the iron plates of bridges,
A din so loud one would think it decides
The rut of a crater or the falls of a mountain.
And their momentum still shakes and jolts me,
So that far off, in the darkness and the night of fate,
They already awaken, with the crash of their wheels,
The silence asleep in the golden stations.

And my taut muscles where everything reverberates
And prolongs itself and suddenly lives again
Communicate, minute by minute,
This sonorous and throbbing flight to my mind.
It fills it with anguish and charms it with strange
Ecstasy and ample and furious voluptuousness,
Suggesting to it, along the roads of speed,
A new wake toward the old beauty.

Oh! the fiery rhythms of all nature
And to feel them and to shoot them through oneself!
To live the movements spread through the woods,
The soil, the wind, the sea and the thunders;
To will that in one’s brain the universe quiver;
And to condense its clear shivers
Into ardent images,
To love, above all to love the lightning and the flashes
With which the devourers of space and air
Set fire to their passage!

Emile Verhaeren

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

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