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With its broad hearses
Adorned with majestic plumes,
Through the mornings, in the mists,
Death goes about.
Decked out and black and opulent,
Veiled drums, slow music,
With its broad hearses,
Flanked by four street lamps,
Death spreads out and magnifies itself.
Like nocturnal treasures,
The great emblazoned coffins
– Silver tears and golden coats of arms –
Hear the resounding hour of the passing bells
That the bells cast, over there:
The hour that falls, with leaps
And sobs, upon the houses,
The hour that dies upon the dwellings,
With leaps and sobs of lead.
Decked out and black and opulent,
At the cry of the violent organs
That celebrate her,
Death, all in shadows,
Reigns, like a seated idol,
Beneath the dome of the churches.
Fires, twisted like hydras,
Bristle, around the immense catafalque
Where angels, holding scythes and candles,
Raise their vehemence,
Trumpets brandished, toward the void.
The emptiness is magnified beneath the gaping transept
High children’s voices
Cast toward the mercy seats
Cries twisted like ropes,
While the old walls
Rise, like white shrouds,
Around the formidable and tottering block
Of these massive funerals.
Draped in black and familiar,
Death goes along the streets
Long and linear.
Draped in black, like the evening,
Old Death, aggressive and gruff,
Goes through the quarters
Of shops and trades,
In a carriage that is heightened
By great extravagant panels,
The color of wear and olden times.
Draped in black, Death
Breaking, in her hands, the fate
Of meticulous and thoughtful people
Who exhaust themselves, in their homes,
Vainly, trying to make a fortune,
Death, sudden and unwelcome,
Puts them in order in their coffins
As in regular compartments.
And the bells toll painfully
A wretched burial,
Over the deceased, who is carted,
Through the colossal churches,
Toward a corner of shadow, where a few candles
Poor flames, burn, before the Virgin
Dressed in black and needy,
Death reaches even the outskirts,
In a tottering and heavy cart,
With old nags
That she whips
Every morning, toward what fates?
Dressed in black,
Death steps over the sidewalk
And the pale sewer, where the milestones are mirrored,
That go over there, one by one, toward the dreary fields;
And nimble and rough and disdainful
Reaches the stairs and stops on the landings
Where one hears weeping and sobbing,
Behind the half-open door,
People letting hope fall,
Inert.
And in the endless rain,
A little suburban church,
Very faintly, rings a farewell,
Over the white pine coffin
That draws near, with mournful people,
Along the roads, silently.
Such is everyday and logical Death
Who does her work and marks it with crosses
And with dreary farewells and voices
Crying toward the unknown liturgical hopes.
But other times, it is great and sated Death
With her wing gathering far off,
Toward the cities of dread.
A strange russet sky burns the moist earth
Black towers stretch upright
Like arms, in the terror of creatures
The nights fall as if thickened,
The heavy nights, the moldy nights,
Where, in the greasy air and the rancid heat,
Full dumpcarts, Death goes about.
Ample and giant like the shadow,
From top to bottom of the dark houses,
One hears her glide, rapid and panting.
The fear of the coming day, the fear of all waiting,
The fear of every instant that shoots forth,
Persecutes hearts, everywhere,
And suddenly straightens, in their sweat, upright
Those who, toward midnight, think of morning
The hospitals swollen with diseases,
With the feverish eyes of their red windows
Look at the troubled sky, where nothing stirs
Nor answers the grown distresses.
The sewers roll the poison
And the acids and the chlorines,
Color of nacre and phosphorus,
Vainly kill her flowering.
Great bumblebees resound
For everyone, for no one
The churches barricade their threshold,
Before the mass of coffins.
And one hears, in frantic gallops,
Death pass and the coffins that are transported
To the necropolises, whose doors,
Neither night nor day, close anymore.
Tragic and black and legendary,
With sticky feet, with mad gestures,
Death sweeps in one great hole
The entire city to the cemetery.
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-death-emile-verhaeren/