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The snow falls, unceasingly,
Like a slow and long and poor wool,
Across the dreary and long and poor plain,
Cold with love, warm with hate.
The snow falls, infinitely,
Like a moment –
Monotonous – within a moment;
The snow drops, the snow falls,
Monotonous, on the houses
And the barns and their partitions;
The snow falls and falls
By the myriad, in the cemetery, in the hollow of the tombs.
The apron of evil seasons,
Violently, up there, is untied;
The apron of woes is shaken
With gusts of wind, over the hamlets of the horizons.
The frost descends, deep into the bones,
And misery, deep into the enclosures,
The snow and misery, deep into the souls;
The heavy and diaphanous snow,
Deep in the cold hearths and the soulless flames,
That wither, in the cabins.
At the crossroads of twisted paths,
The villages are alone, like death;
The great trees, crystallized with frost,
Along their procession through the snow,
Intertwine their branches of salt.
The old mills, where white moss gathers,
Appear, like traps,
Suddenly upright, on a hillock;
Below, the roofs and the awnings
In the squall, against the wind,
Since November, have been struggling;
While infinitely the heavy and full snow
Falls, across the dreary and long and poor plain.
Thus the snow goes off into the distance,
In every path, in every corner,
Always the snow and its shroud,
The pale and barren snow,
In wild vagabond rags,
Through the illimitable winter world.
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-snow-emile-verhaeren/