Our Desires Are Love’s Devouring Ember

Poem by Théodore Agrippa D'Aubigné Period 16th century

Our desires are love’s devouring ember,
Our bodies its workshop, its flames our pains,
Its pincers our eyes, and the tempering our tears,
Our sighs its bellows, and our senses its furnace.

With wrath, its hammers, it torments our ease
And upon the hardness, it beats down our sorrows,
She serves it as anvil and as stuff our hearts
Which in the too violent fire, with our tears it soothes,

So that soothing and wetting little by little
It burns the more and gathers* its fire.
But the abundance of water can deaden the flame.

I will deceive the child, for thinking to set me ablaze,
So many tears will flow onto the fire that inflames me
That it will drown its furnace instead of sprinkling it.

Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné

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

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