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In the quivering air I hear the long murmur
Of the evening bell that rings with slowness;
The flocks, bleating, wander on the green;
The shepherd withdraws and gives nature over
To the lonely night, to my dreaming thought.
In the azure east the star of night advances,
And all the air is filled with a solemn calm.
From the old temple greened beneath this immortal ivy
The bird of night alone disturbs the great silence.
Nothing is heard but the sound of the uncertain insect,
And sometimes still, through these beech trees,
The interrupted sounds of the rural bells
Of the flock falling asleep on the distant hillside.
In this field where one sees the melancholy grass
Waver over the furrows that these tombs form,
The rustic forebears of our humble hamlets
Sleep beneath the ancient yew to the sound of the night wind.
The confused warbling of young Progne,
The fresh and celestial voice of the zephyr in the morning,
The shrill songs of the cock will no longer awaken
These shepherds asleep beneath this rustic bed.
Beside the burning hearth a modest wife
No longer prepares for them the country meal;
Never on their return will they see, alas!
A light troop of children with gentle speech,
Surrounding their knees and delaying their steps,
Disputing for the love and kisses of a father.
Often, O laborers! Ceres ripens for you
The waving harvests in the fields she gilds;
Often with great noise fell beneath your blows
The resounding pines in the sonorous forest.
In vain ambition, intoxicated by its desires,
Scorns both your labors and your simple leisure:
Ah! what are honors? The child of victory,
The peaceful mortal who leads a flock,
Die equally; and the steps of glory,
Like those of pleasure, lead only to the grave.
What matters it that for us vain panegyrics
Have swelled their accents with a faithless voice?
Do animated busts, do pompous monuments,
Make the mute relics of the dead speak?
Cast far from the hazards that form virtue,
Frozen by poverty in the days they lived,
Perhaps here death chains in its empire
Rustic Newtons of the earth unknown,
Illustrious unknowns whose sacred talents
Would have charmed the gods on the breathing lute:
So shines the pearl at the bottom of the vast seas;
So die in the fields the passing roses
That one never sees blush, and that, far from the shepherdesses,
Perfume the deserts with useless fragrances.
There sleep in oblivion poets without glory,
Orators without voice, heroes without victory:
What am I saying? Tituses made to be adored.
But if fate veiled so many sublime virtues,
Beneath these mourning trees how many crimes too
Have silence and death not devoured!
Far from a deceitful world, these shepherds without envy,
Carrying with them their tranquil virtues,
Unknown passengers on the river of time,
Crossed without noise the deserts of life.
A stone, asking passersby for a sigh,
Has saved their memory from the shipwreck of the years;
An ignorant muse engraved there their story
And the sacred text that helps us to die.
In fleeing forever the fields of light,
Who does not turn his head at the end of the race?
The man about to pass seeks new succor:
May the hand of a friend, may his dear and tender cares,
Gently half-open the stone of the tomb!
The fire of friendship still lives in our ashes.
As for me who celebrated these tombs without honors,
If some traveler, drawn to these banks
By the love of dreaming and the charm of tears,
Inquires of my fate in his pensive courses,
Perhaps an old shepherd, while guarding his flocks,
Will simply tell him my story in these words:
“Often we have seen him, in his poised walk,
At the smile of morning, in the vermilion east,
Climb the fresh hillsides through the dew,
To admire from afar the rising of the sun.
Down there, near the stream, on the light moss,
In the shade of the linden bathed by the current,
Motionless he dreamed, remaining all day long
With his eyes fixed on the passing wave.
Sometimes in the woods he would meditate his verses
To the plaintive murmur of the foliage and the airs.
One morning our eyes, beneath the centenarian tree,
Sought him in vain at the bend of the stream;
The dawn reappeared, and the tree and the hillside,
And the heather still, all was solitary.
The following day, alas! stretched out in file,
A funeral procession advanced along the temple path.
Come near, traveler! Read these verses, and contemplate
This sad monument that the moss has eaten away.”
Epitaph.
Here sleeps, sheltered from the storms of the world,
He who was long the plaything of their fury.
In the forests he sought the deep retreat,
And melancholy dwelt in his heart.
He adored the charms of divine friendship,
To the unhappy he gave all he had, tears.
Passerby, do not carry an indiscreet torch
Into the abyss where death hides him from your view;
Let him rest on the unknown shore,
On the other side of the tomb.
London, 1796.
Chateaubriand
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-rural-tombs-francois-rene-de-chateaubriand/