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It is a summer night; a night whose vast wings
Make thousands of sparks leap forth in the azure;
Which, reviving the sky like a tarnished mirror,
Lets the charmed eye fathom its infinity;
Night when the firmament, stripped of clouds,
Reopens all the pages of this book of fire!
On the last summit of the mountains, whence the gaze
Spreads at random over a troubled horizon,
I sit down in silence, and let my thought
Float like a sea where the moon is cradled.
The harmonious Ether, in its azure waves,
Wraps the mountains in a purer fluid;
Their contours, which it extinguishes, their peaks, which it effaces,
Seem to swim in the air and tremble in space,
As one sees to the bottom of a calm sea
The shadow of its shore rippling beneath the waves!
Beneath this ray-less light, more serene than a dawn,
To the contemplative eye the earth seems to blossom;
It unrolls afar its varied horizons
Where played the hand that sculpted the universe!
There, like a wave, a hill undulates,
There, hillock pursues hillock that recedes,
And the valley, veiled in verdant curtains,
Hollows itself like a bed for shadow and for waters;
Here spreads the plain, where, as on the shore,
The wave of grain sinks and rises;
There, like a serpent whose coils are broken,
The river, re-knotting its interrupted waters,
Traces for its silver course countless meanders,
Loses itself under the hill and reappears in the shadow:
Like a black cloud, the deep forests
With a grayish patch shade the fallow fields,
And farther off, where the crescent shore folds back,
Where the confused gaze drowns in vapors,
A gulf of the sea, intersected by islands,
Struck by the white reflections of the sky through the moon,
Like a vast mirror, shattered on the dust,
Reflects in the dark fragments of light.
How divine is man’s dwelling, when night
Thus stifles the noise of stormy life!
This sleep that falls from on high with the dew
And slows the course of exhausted life,
Seems also to hover over all the elements,
And to calm the beating of all that lives;
A pious silence spreads over nature,
The river has its brilliance, but no longer its murmur,
The roads are deserted, the cottages voiceless,
No leaf trembles in the vault of the woods,
And the sea itself, expiring on its shore,
Scarcely rolls a plaintive wave onto the beach;
One would say, seeing this world without echoes,
Where the ear enjoys a magical repose,
Where all is majesty, twilight, silence,
And whose existence only the gaze attests,
That one contemplates in a dream, through the past,
The phantom of a world where life has ceased!
Only, in the trunks of the pines with broad summits,
Whose scattered groups grow on these abysses,
The breath of the night, which sometimes breaks,
Spreads from time to time harmonious voices,
As if to attest, in their sonorous tops,
That this world, drowsing, still quivers and lives.
A world is drowsing beneath the vault of the heavens?
But in the vault itself where my eyes rise,
How many new worlds, how many countless suns,
Betrayed by their splendor, sparkle in the shadow!
Exhausted signs wear themselves out counting them,
And the tireless soul is weary of climbing there!
The centuries, accusing their sterile alphabet,
Of these endless stars have named but one in a thousand;
What am I saying! At the edges of the heavens, they have seen only undulate
The dying glimmers of that distant hearth;
There ancient Orion piercing the veils of night
Whose seven stars Job first named;
The ship cleaving the silent ether,
The herdsman whose chariot drags through the heavens,
The lyre with golden strings, the swan with white wings,
The steed that draws sparks from the sky,
The scales tilting their uncertain pan,
The blond hair given to the breath of morning,
The ram, the bull, the eagle, the archer,
All that the shepherds contemplated on earth,
All that heroes wished to eternalize,
All that lovers have been able to divinize,
Transported to the sky by touching emblems,
Could not give names to these brilliant systems.
The heavens for mortals are a half-open book,
Line by line offered to their eyes by nature;
Each century with difficulty deciphers a page,
And says: Here ends this magnificent work:
But ceaselessly the finger of the celestial writer
Turns one more leaf of this divine book,
And the eye sees, dazzled by these brilliant mysteries,
Sparkle endlessly with more beautiful characters!
What am I saying? At each vigil, a daring sage
In boundless space opens new heavens for himself;
Since the crystal that brings worlds closer
Pierces the deep distances of the vast Ether,
And carries the gaze into lost infinity,
As far as the eye of calculation recedes, confounded,
The heavens have opened like a somber vault
That, breaking, lets its shadow vanish;
Its fires multiplied more than the wandering atom
That a transparent ray of sun lights up,
Separated or grouped, by layers, by tiers,
In waves, in foam, have flooded its shores,
So numerous, so pressed, that our dazzled eye,
Pursuing in space a vanished star,
Sees a hundred times in the field its eyelid embraces
Worlds circling in torrents of dust!
Farther off are those glimmers that our ancestors took
For the drops of milk that nourished the gods;
They were not mistaken: these pearls of light,
That have whitened the remote expanse of night,
Are future stars, enflamed seeds
That the ever-full hand has sown for the ages,
And that the spirit of God, beneath its fecund wings,
With its shadow of fire broods in the cradle of worlds.
It is from there that, taking flight at the written day,
Like a new eaglet escaping the nest,
They begin without guide and describe without trace
The radiant ellipse in the midst of space,
And go, shattering by shock a star at its decline,
To renew heavens always at their morning.
And man meanwhile, that invisible insect,
Crawling in the furrows of an imperceptible globe,
Measures the magnitudes and weights of these fires,
Assigns them their place, their route, and their laws,
As if, in his hands bowed down by the compass,
He rolled these suns like grains of sand!
Each atom of fire that in the immense ether
In the abyss of nights the distracted eye sees floating,
Each wandering spark at the edges of the empyrean,
Whose azure glimmer scintillates as it dies,
Each spot of milk that whitens the horizon,
Each tint of the sky that does not even have a name,
Are so many suns, kings of as many systems,
That, crowning themselves with second suns,
Guide, gravitating in these immensities,
A hundred planets burning with their borrowed fires,
And hold in the ether each as much place
As the sun of man in turning embraces,
He, his moon and his earth, and the morning star,
And Saturn obscured by its distant ring!
Oh! how great are your heavens! and how the spirit of man
Bends and falls from on high, my God! when it names you!
When, descending from the dome where his eyes wandered,
An atom, he measures himself against the infinity of the heavens,
And when, suspecting the prodigy of your grandeur,
His gaze is dazzled, and he says to himself: What am I?
Oh! what am I, Lord! before the heavens and you?
The weight of your immensity presses upon me,
It equals me to nothingness, it erases me, it overwhelms me,
And I esteem myself less than one of these grains of sand,
For this sand rolled by the inconstant waves,
If it has less extent, alas! has more time;
It will always fill its void in space
When I shall have no more name, nor time, nor place;
Its fate before you is less sad than mine,
Insensible nothingness does not feel that it is nothing
It does not gnaw itself to enlarge its being,
It wants neither to rise, nor to judge, nor to know,
By an immense desire it is not agitated;
Dead, it does not dream of an immortality!
It does not have this horror of my oppressed soul,
For it does not bear the weight of your thought!
Alas! why have my eyes risen so high?
I was happy below in my obscurity,
My corner in the expanse and my flash of life
Seemed to me a fate almost worthy of envy;
I looked from on high at this grass; comparing,
I despised the insect and found myself great;
And now, drowned in the abyss of being,
I doubt that a glance from the God who gave us birth
Could distinguish me from it, vile, crawling,
So low, so far from him, so near to nothingness!
And I let myself go to my deep sorrow,
Like a stone to the bottom of the abysses of the wave;
And my own gaze, as if ashamed of itself,
With a vile disdain turns away from me,
And I say to myself to my doubting soul:
Go, your fate is not worth the glance it costs you!
And my dried eyes fall back down here below,
And I see the grass that flowers beneath my steps,
And I hear buzzing under the grass I tread
Those floods of living beings that each furrow rolls:
Atoms animated by the divine breath,
Each ray of day raises endless ones,
A minute suffices to complete their being,
Their floating whirlwinds fall to be reborn,
The sand is alive with them, the ether is sown with them,
And the air I breathe is itself animated;
And whence comes this life, and whence can it blossom,
If not from the gaze where the dawn is kindled?
Who would make the grass germinate and the lawn flower,
If this divine gaze did not cast its ray there?
This eye then lowers itself upon all nature,
It has then neither contempt, nor favor, nor measure,
And before the infinite for which all is alike,
It is then as great to be man as sun!
And I feel this ray warm me with its flame,
And my heart consoles itself, and I say to my soul:
Man or world at his feet, all is indifferent,
But let us rejoice, for our master is great!
Float, suns of the nights, illuminate the spheres;
Buzz under your grass, ephemeral insects;
Let us give glory on high, and in our depths,
You by your nothingness, and you by your grandeurs,
And you by your thought, man! supreme grandeur,
Mirror that he created to admire himself,
Echo that in his work he cast so far,
So that his holy name might be repeated everywhere.
May this humility that lowers me before him
Be a sublime homage, and not a sadness;
And may his will, too high for our eyes,
Be done on earth, as it is in heaven!
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-the-infinite-in-the-heavens-alphonse-de-lamartine/