Pride

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

No longer because it lives on anguish and suffering,
But because each hour it creates a hope,
The harsh universe is full of faith.
It matters not that beneath the roofs,
In the dwellings,
When the day is born or when it fades,
The prayers to Christ on the cross
Are dying.

Efforts multiplied in every place of the world,
It is you who harbor the profound beliefs:
Whoever risks and labors, believes;
Whoever seeks and invents, believes still;
The lights of each dawn
Resurrect, fatally, in the depths of hearts
The confidence in their ardor.

Henceforth it is pride that attacks the mystery
That the earth always proposes and causes us,
Young and joyful pride that turns into fervor
So as never to be daunted before the obstacle
And itself to create the daily miracle
That the human mind needs.

O belief in my brow, in my eyes, in my hands,
Belief in my brain that research intoxicates,
Belief in all my being ardent, vibrant, darting,
How you make me more sure and decided
In the danger and the glory that I have
Of living!

Since I feel myself
To be but a marvelous fragment
Of the world in the grip of gigantic metamorphoses,
The wood, the mount, the soil, the wind, the air and the sky
Become more fraternal to me
And I love myself in the splendor of things.

I love and admire myself in such a vermilion gesture
As a man like me makes
In his passage over the earth.
Just like him I am endowed
With genius and with will
And what he does, I can do.

With my two lungs, I breathe in the exploit
That the wind brings me from all points of the world.
Is mine, all thinking clear, useful, blithe and upright
Whose audacity I have felt in my profound soul.

Thus
I commune
With all the life
Of things and of beings.
I lavish myself in all, as all penetrates me,
Vice, virtue, merit or fault.
All my pride exerts itself to beautifully suffer
And when it must, to proudly die,
So as never to lower my force intense and high.

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-pride-emile-verhaeren/