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O nothingness! O only God that I can comprehend!
Silent abyss to which I shall descend again,
Why did you let man escape from your hand?
In what deep sleep I slept within your breast!
In eternal oblivion I would still be sleeping there;
My eyes would not have seen this false day that I abhor,
And in your long night, my peaceful sleep
Would never have known either dreams or awakening.
– But since I was born, no doubt I had to be born.
If I had been consulted, I would have refused existence.
Vain regrets! destiny condemned me to the day,
And I came, O sun, to curse you in my turn.
– However, it is true, this first dawn,
This uncertain awakening of a being who does not know himself,
This infinite space opening before his eyes,
This long gaze of man questioning the heavens,
This vague enchantment, these torrents of hope,
Dazzle the eyes at the threshold of existence.
Hail, new dwelling where time has cast me,
Globe, future witness of my felicity!
Hail, sacred torch that nourishes nature!
Sun, first love of every creature!
Vast heavens, who hide the God who made you!
Earth, cradle of man, admirable palace!
Man, similar to me, my companion, my brother!
You more beautiful in my eyes, to my soul more dear!
Hail, objects, witnesses, instruments of happiness!
Fulfill your destinies, I bring you a heart …
– How brilliant this dream is! but, alas! it is a dream.
It was beginning then; now it is ending.
Sorrow slowly opens the tomb for me;
Hail, my last day! be my most beautiful day!
I have lived; I have passed through this desert of life,
Where always under my steps each flower withered;
Where always hope, abusing my reason,
Showed me happiness on a vague horizon.
Where from the wind of death the burning breaths
Under my lips always dried up the fountains.
Let another, exhaling in superfluous regrets,
Ask the past again for its days that are no more,
Weep for his spring’s vanished dawn,
And consent to live a second life:
For me, when destiny would offer to my choice
The scepter of genius, or the throne of kings,
Glory, beauty, treasures, wisdom,
And would join to its gifts eternal youth,
I swear it by death; in such a world,
No, I would not want to grow young again by a sun.
I do not want a world where everything changes, where everything passes:
Where, even to memory, everything wears out and everything fades;
Where everything is fleeting, perishable, uncertain;
Where the day of happiness has no tomorrow!
– How many times thus, deceived by existence,
From my breast forever I have banished hope!
How many times thus my cast-down spirit
Believed it wrapped itself in a cold virtue,
And, dreaming of Zeno’s deceptive wisdom,
Under a stoic cloak hid its weakness!
In its indifference one day buried,
To find rest it invoked oblivion.
Vain rest! false sleep! – As at the foot of the hills,
Where Rome emerges from the breast of its own ruins,
The eye sees in this chaos, confusedly scattered,
Ancient monuments, modern ramparts,
Crumbling theaters, whose superb pediments
Sleep in the dust or crawl under the grass,
The palaces of heroes covered by brambles,
Gods lying at the threshold of their deserted temples,
The eternal obelisk shading the cottage,
The column bearing a foreign image,
The grass in the forum, the flowers in the tombs,
And these old pantheons peopled with new gods;
While, rising from distance to distance,
A faint noise of life interrupts this silence:
Such is our soul, after these long convulsions;
Shaking reason to its very foundations,
Misfortune makes of it only an immense ruin,
Where like a great debris despair dominates!
Of extinguished feelings a silent chaos,
Opposed elements, without life and without rest,
Remnants of passions erased by time,
Disordered combat of wishes and thoughts,
Expiring memories, regrets, disgusts, remorse.
If at least these debris attested its death!
But under this vast mourning the soul is still alive;
This fire without fuel feeds itself;
It is reborn from its ashes, and this fatal torch
Fears to burn still beyond the tomb.
Soul! who then are you? flame that devours me,
Must you live after me? must you suffer still?
Mysterious host, what will you become?
To the great torch of day will you reunite? Perhaps of this fire you are only a spark,
Only a stray ray, which that star recalls.
Perhaps, dying when man is destroyed,
You are only a purer sap that the earth has produced,
An animated mire, a thinking clay…
But what do I see? at this word, you shudder with terror.
Dreading nothingness, and weary of suffering,
Alas! you fear to live and tremble to die.
– Who will reveal you, redoubtable mystery?
I listen in vain to the voice of the sages of the earth:
Doubt also misleads these sublime minds,
And from the same clay they were molded.
Gathering the rays of ancient wisdom,
Socrates sought you in the beautiful days of Greece;
Plato at Sunium sought you after him;
Two thousand years have passed, I seek you today;
Two thousand years will pass, and the children of men
Will still stir in the night where we are.
Truth, rebellious, escapes our regards,
And God alone reunites all its scattered rays.
– Thus, ready to close my eyes to the light,
No hope will come to console my eyelid:
My soul will have passed, without guide and without torch
From the night of this world into the night of the tomb,
And I carry at random, to the world where I rush,
My virtue without hope, my ills without reward.
Answer me, cruel God! If it is true that you are,
I have then the fatal right to curse your laws!
After the weight of the day, at least the mercenary
In the evening sits in the shade, and receives his wages:
And I, when I bend under the burden of fate,
When my day is finished, my wages is death.
—
But, while exhaling doubt and blasphemy,
My eyes on my tomb, I weep for myself,
Faith, awakening, like a sweet memory,
Casts a ray of hope on my pale future,
Under the shadow of death revives and inflames me,
And restores to my old days the youth of the soul.
I climb back to the gleams of this divine torch,
From the sunset of my life to its laughing morning;
I embrace in one glance the human destiny;
To my satisfied eyes everything orders and links itself;
I read in the future the reason of the present;
Hope closes after me the doors of nothingness,
And reopening the horizon to my delighted soul,
Explains to me by death the enigma of life.
This faith that awaits me at the edge of my tomb,
Alas! I remember, hovered over my cradle.
Of the promised land immortal heritage,
The fathers to their sons transmitted it from age to age.
Our spirit receives it at its first awakening,
Like gifts from on high, life and the sun;
Like the milk of the soul, opening the eyelid,
It flowed for us from the lips of a mother; It penetrated man in his tender season;
Its torch in hearts preceded reason.
The child, trying his first word,
Stammers in the cradle its sublime symbol,
And, under the maternal eye germinating without his knowledge,
He feels it in his heart grow with virtue.
Ah! if truth was made for the earth,
No doubt it received this simple character;
No doubt from childhood offered to our regards,
Into the spirit through the senses entering from all sides,
Like the pure rays of the celestial flame
It must from the dawn surround our soul,
From the spirit through love descend into hearts,
Unite with memory, merge into customs;
Like a fertile grain that winter still covers,
In our breast germinate long before blooming,
And, when man has passed his stormy summer,
Give its divine fruit for immortality.
Mysterious sun! torch of another sphere,
Lend to my dying eyes your mystic light,
Spring from the breast of the Most High, consoling ray.
Vivifying star, rise in my heart!
Alas! I have only you; in my funeral hours,
My reason, which pales, abandons me to darkness;
This superb reason, insufficient torch,
Goes out like life at the doors of the tomb;
Come then to replace it, O celestial light!
Come inundate my eyelid with a day without cloud;
Take the place of the sun that I must no longer see,
And shine on the horizon like the evening star.
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-faith-alphonse-de-lamartine/