The Sea

Poem by François-René De Chateaubriand Collection Nature PaintingsThemes Nature, SeaPeriod 18th century

O philosophical picture of the vast seas,
You please a heart agitated by sorrows:
When from your breast tormented by the winds,
When from the reefs and the ancient shores
Come sounds, melancholic voices,
The softened soul loses itself in its dreams,
And, wandering from thought to thought,
Like the waves from murmur to murmur,
It mingles with all of nature:
With the winds, in the depths of the deserts,
It moans along the savage woods,
On the Ocean it flies with the storms,
Rumbles in the lightning, and thunders in the seas.

But when the day upon the trembling waves
Goes to die; when, still smiling,
The old sun glazes with purple and gold
The changing green of the sparkling seas,
Into fleeing and velvety distances,
Plunging my thought and my sight,
I love to create enchanted worlds
Bathed in the waters of an unknown sea.
Ardent desire, conqueror of obstacles,
Finds, embellishes pastoral shores,
Places of peace, islands of happiness,
Where, transported by sweet chimeras,
I abandon myself to the dreams of my heart.

Chateaubriand

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

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