Europe

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

An evening full of light and golden clouds,
From the depths of distant skies, shines in the heart of a port
Light with masts and heavy with monstrous ships;
The shadow is purple around the eagles of the Empire
Whose giant bronze reigns over the houses.
We hear the bells leaping in their belfries;
Heroic flags hang from the nearby pediments,
And glory in tumult invades the horizon.
And this is the hour when dream and effort merge,
When one lingers, gazing far off at the sea,
Dreaming of what man and the universe are
Thanks to Europe, intense and mistress of the world.
For a hundred and a hundred years
Since blood has flowed in her panting heart,
Always, despite mourning and voracious plagues,
And wars crying hatred through time,
She educated her races
To never plant
The trees of their strength and their will
Except in the enclosed garden of sure realities.
Clear-sightedness, method, order and measure;
Roads whose end no fog conceals;
Harvest immensely and duly pursued
Along the clear branches of the vines of life;
Calculation in the universal work that seethes;
Haste, calm, prudence, audacity,
Fever mingled with tenacious slowness,
O the complex and formidable ardor
For the struggles and conquests
That Europe carries in her head
And treasures in her heart!
She is everywhere present
And active,
Her eyes hallucinated by the red treasures
That in their obscure, deep and meandering folds,
The mountains of Asia and the forests of Africa
One knows not where, over there, still reserve for her.
The violent trees of millennial forests
Bend their delicious fruits toward her hands:
The fists of their branches seem to twist the skies
And their firm and high forehead to butt against the thunders.
In the heart of archipelagos, she explores islands
Whose soil is streaked with asbestos and silver
And whose great flowers, moving in the evening winds,
Present to her their juices or their docile venoms.
The mountains are perforated and the isthmuses split
So that water roads less long and less lost
May join together the marvelous ports of the earth.
Even the night and its vassal stars
Collaborate, up there, with their united fires,
In the tranquil, enormous and solitary march,
Of great vessels pointing their course toward the infinite;
And the merchants of London and the brokers of Hamburg,
And those who set out from Genoa or Marseille,
And the adventurers whom audacity counsels,
And the bold scholars and the numb emigrants,
All, wherever they disembark, pass, struggle, settle,
Entrust to the new soils of the most distant lands,
With their active fever and their precise work,
The seed that made their Western soul bloom.

O these heroes of Europe armed with clear projects,
Active in triumph, skillful in reversals,
Dominating minds of misdeeds and crimes,
Hands fastening hope to unanimous force,
Dazzled builders of the towers of the future
Where the silver stones of the firmest ideas
Shine, flooded with wind, space and fires,
Are they giants by their ardor to unite all!
They would forget themselves in their fertile work,
Were it not that in the North, up there, under the deep mists,
The banks of Glasgow, Antwerp and Frankfurt
Still watch, with their eyes of fever and gold,
Their gestures as seekers scattered over the world.

The immense and rich and prodigal earth, the living
Earth belongs to the one who holds it best
And tames it, under his victorious effort,
Like a steaming horse rearing in the light.
And Europe who modeled over the course of time
Rough Oceania and young America,
With the skillful fingers of her lyrical force,
Pursues, as in the past, her exalting work.
The great luminous lakes of the black Congos tempt her,
The old deserts sown with oases and tents,
The red equator and its dazzling golden flora.

Before the cruel mask of ferocious idols,
She suddenly brings new words,
She unfolds in still gloomy souls
The dark wing that will sustain their first flight
And on narrow and hard foreheads that are shrunk
By slavery, fear, dread, cruelty,
Her hand makes slowly but surely float
Some future dream that would be justice.

Emile Verhaeren

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

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