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The plain is dreary, with its paddocks, with its barns
And its farms whose gables are worm-eaten,
The plain is dreary and weary and no longer defends itself,
The plain is dreary and dead — and the city devours it.
Formidable and criminal,
The arms of diabolical machines,
Mowing down the evangelical wheat,
Have frightened the old melancholy sower
Whose gesture seemed in accord with the sky.
The filthy smoke and its tatters of soot
Have crossed the wind and soiled it:
A poor and debased sun
Has worn itself away into rain.
And now, where the bright houses rose in tiers
And the orchards and the trees scattered with gold,
One sees, to infinity, from south to north,
The black immensity of rectangular factories.
Like an enormous and taciturn beast
That drones behind a wall,
The humming is heard, rhythmic and hard,
Of boilers and nocturnal millstones;
The ground vibrates, as if it were fermenting,
The work boils like a crime,
The sewer carries a hairy mire
Toward the river it pollutes;
A torture of trees flayed alive
Writhes, convulsive arms,
On the facade, on the nearby wood;
The nettle exhausts the sandy soil and the shingle at its heart,
And dunghills, ever higher, of refuse
— Oily cements, rotted plaster, cracked rubble —
Along old ditches and dark banks
Raise, in the evening, monuments of rot.
Under the thundering and heavy sheds,
Nights, days,
Without air or sleep,
People toil far from the sun:
Pieces of life in the enormous gearing,
Pieces of flesh fixed, ingeniously,
Piece by piece, floor by floor,
From one end to the other of the vast whirling.
Their eyes have become the eyes of the machine;
Their whole body: forehead, neck, torso, shoulders, spine,
Bends to the regulated play of iron and steel;
Their hands and their ten fingers run over keyboards
Where a hundred spindles of thread turn and unwind;
And prompt hands and rapid fingers
Wear themselves out so hard,
In their effort
On the carnivorous matter,
That they leave there, at every moment,
Imprints of rage and drops of blood.
Tell me! The ancient peaceful labor, in the August
Of ripe rye and russet oats,
With arms bare, forehead upright,
When the gold of the wheat undulates and rolls up
Toward the torrid horizon where silence boils.
Tell me! The tepid rest and the chosen noons,
Weaving shade for siestas,
Under the branches, whose nimble winds
Rhythm, slowly, the great leafy gestures.
Tell me, the whole plain like a fat garden,
Utterly mad with birds scattered in the light,
That sing of it, with their full voices,
So near the sky that one cannot hear them.
But today, the plain? — It is finished;
The plain is dreary and no longer defends itself:
The flux of ruins and their reflux
Have submerged it, with monotony.
One meets, in the distance, only patched-up enclosures
And roads black with coal and slag
And skeletons of farmsteads
And trains suddenly cutting villages in two.
The Madonnas have silenced their oracle voices
At the edge of the wood, among the trees;
And the old saints and their marble pedestals
Have fallen into the miracle fountains.
And everything is there, like empty coffins
— Thresholds and cracked walls and split roofs —
And everything complains like lost souls
Who sob in the evening in the damp heather.
Alas! The plain, alas! It is finished!
And its steeples are dead and its mills crippled.
The plain, alas! It has coughed out its agony
In the last hiccups of an angelus.
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-plain-emile-verhaeren/