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In these cities of shadow and ebony
From which prodigious fires rise;
In these cities, where throngs surge,
With their songs, their cries and their blasphemies,
In great swell, the crowds;
In these cities suddenly terrified
By bloody revolt and nocturnal dread,
I feel my multiplied heart leap and exult
And suddenly pour itself out within me.
Fever, with quivering hands,
Fever, in the course of madness and hatred,
Drags me along
And rolls me, like a pebble, down the roads.
All calculation falls and is erased,
The heart rushes toward glory or toward crime;
And suddenly I appear to myself as the one
Who has fled outside himself
Toward the savage call of unanimous forces.
Whether rage, or love, or madness,
Everything passes like a lightning bolt, deep in consciences;
Everything is divined, before one has felt
The nail of a certain goal enter one’s mind.
Haggard people run with torches,
A murmur of the sea rushes in, deep in the porches,
Walls, signs, houses, palaces and stations,
In the mad evening, before my eyes, are terrified;
On the squares, the golden posts of light
Stretch toward the black skies fires that grow exasperated;
A dial gleams, blood-colored, on the brow of towers;
Let a tribune speak, at the corner of a crossroads,
Before one grasps a meaning in his words,
Already one knows his gesture – and it is with fury
That one insults the laureled brow of an emperor
And that one breaks the altar from which the idol imposes itself.
The night is swarming and terrible with noise;
An electric ardor burns in the atmosphere;
Hearts are to be taken; the soul clenches
In an enormous anguish and delivers itself in cries;
One feels that a single instant is master
To blossom or to crush what is about to be born;
The people belong to the one whom destiny
Endowed with hands powerful enough
To wield the lightning and the thunders
And to unveil, among so many contradictory gleams,
The new star that each new era
Chooses to magnetize universal life.
Oh! tell me, do you feel how beautiful and profound it is,
My heart,
This hour
That rings and sings at the heart of the world?
What do you care about old wisdoms
And the setting suns of dogmas on the sea
Here is the hour boiling with blood and youth,
Here is the violent and marvelous intoxication
Of a wine so strong that nothing in it seems bitter.
A vast hope, come from the unknown, displaces
The ancient equilibrium with which souls are weary;
Nature seems to sculpt
A new face for its eternity;
Everything moves – and one would say the horizons are marching.
The bridges, the towers, the arches
Tremble, deep in the deep ground.
The multitude and its sudden surges
Seem to make the oppressed cities burst,
The time is here of collapses and of miracles
And of gestures of lightning and gold,
Over there, in the distance, on the Thabors.
Like a wave lost in rivers,
Like a wing erased in the depths of the expanse,
Plunge,
My heart, into these crowds beating the capitals
With their furies and their triumphant rages;
See each clamor, each madness and each dread
Grow angry and exult;
Make a bundle of these thousands of fibers,
Taut muscles and vibrating nerves;
Magnetize and unite all these currents
And take
So large a part in these sudden metamorphoses
Of men and things,
That you feel the obscure and formidable law
That dominates and oppresses them
Suddenly, in flashes of lightning, inscribe itself in you.
Put your life in accord with the destinies
That the crowd, without knowing it,
Promulgates, in this illuminated night of anguish.
What tomorrow will be, right or duty,
It alone has the deep instinct of it;
And the whole universe labors and collaborates,
With thousands of causes we ignore,
In each effort toward the future that it elaborates,
Red and tragic, on the horizon.
Oh! the future, how one listens to it
Burst through the ground, break the vaults,
In these cities of ebony and gold, where fire
Prowls like a lion whose mane radiates;
Unique minute, when centuries shudder;
Knot that victories untie in battles;
Great hour, when the aspects of the world change,
When what was just and sacred appears strange,
When one climbs toward the summits of another faith,
When the crowd, at last mistress of its anger,
Counting and recounting its long secular ills
On the block of its strength erects a new right.
In these cities suddenly terrified
By red festival and nocturnal dread,
To make yourself greater and to magnify yourself,
My soul, shut yourself in.
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-the-crowd-emile-verhaeren/