The Praise of the Human Body

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th centuryPrint

In the full clarity and its sudden rays
Burning, to the heart, the deep branches,
Women whose naked bodies shine in these gardens,
You are magnificent fragments of the world.

Along the shady box trees and the high stairways,
When you pass, joyfully intertwined,
Your round dance simulates a moving espalier
Laden with fruits hanging from its woven branches.

If in the peace and grandeur of clear noons
One of you suddenly stops and moves no more,
She appears standing like a thyrsus of flesh
Where the fiery vine shoot of her red hair would float.

Weary, when you sleep in the gentle warmth,
Your group is like boats filled
With a broad harvest of sun and flowers
That the pond would gather on its pale banks.

And in your white gestures, under the great green trees,
And in your entwined games, under clusters of roses,
Flow the scattered rhythm in the immense universe
And the tranquil and powerful sap of things.

Your thin and hard bones are white minerals
Solidly raised in noble architecture;
The soul of flame and gold that burns in your brains
Is but a complex and fine aspect of nature.

It is yourself, with its calm and its sweetness,
The beautiful garden that lends you its shady shelters
And the rosebush of pure summers is your heart,
And your lips of fire are its countless roses.

Magnify yourselves then and understand yourselves better!
If you want to know where clarity resides,
Believe that the vibrant gold and the stars of the heavens
Dream, beneath your brow, with their lucid fires.

All is similarity, image, attraction, link;
Like the jewels of a moving diadem,
All interpenetrates and mirrors itself, O women, so well
That in you and outside you, all is yourselves.

Emile Verhaeren

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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