The Song of the Moonbeam

Poem by Guy De Maupassant Collection Des versPeriod 19th century

written for a short story

Do you know who I am? The Moonbeam.
Do you know where I come from? Look up there.
My mother is bright, and the night is dark.
I crawl beneath the tree and glide on the water;
I spread over the grass and run over the dune;
I climb the black wall, the trunk of the birch,
Like a marauder seeking his fortune.
I am never cold; I am never warm.
I am so small that I pass
Where no other would pass.
To the windowpanes I press my face
And I have surprised more than one secret.
I lie down from place to place
And the beasts of the forest,
The lovers with distracted feet,
To love each other better follow my trail.
Then, when I lose myself in space,
I leave in the heart a long regret.

Nightingale and warbler
For me sing at the top
Of elms or pines.
I love to put my head
In the rabbits’ burrow,
Then, leaving their retreat
With sudden bounds,
Each one departs and hurls himself
Across the paths.
At the bottom of hollow ravines
I awaken the fallow deer
And the anxious doe.
She scents, mute,
The hunter who watches her
With death in his hands,
Or the distant calls
Of the great stag preparing
For clandestine loves.

My mother lifts
The foamy waves,
Then I rise,
And on every shore
I wave my fires.
Then I put the sap to sleep
Through the shady wood;
And my brief radiance,
In the sunken paths,
Sometimes seems a blade
To the frightened passerby.
I give dreams
To joyful spirits,
A moment of truce
To unhappy hearts.

Do you know who I am? The Moonbeam.
And do you know why I come from up there?
Under the black trees the night was dark;
You could lose yourself and slip into the water,
Wander through the woods, roam over the dune,
Strike yourself, in the shadow, against the trunk of the birch.
I want to show you the timely road;
And that is why I come from up there.

Guy de Maupassant

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-song-of-the-moonbeam-guy-de-maupassant/