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Speak, speak, Lord, your servant is listening:
I say your servant, for in the end I am;
I am, I want to be, and to walk in your path
Both days and nights.
Fill me with a spirit that makes me understand
What your holy wills command of me,
And reduce my desires to the sole desire of hearing
Your high truths.
But disarm your divine eloquence of lightning;
Make it flow without noise in the midst of my heart
So that it has the dew’s lively abundance
And its lovable sweetness.
You feared it, Hebrews, you believed that the thunderbolt,
That death followed it and must desolate all,
You who in the desert could not resolve
To hear it speak.
“”Speak to us, speak to us, you said to Moses,
But obtain from the Lord that he not speak to us;
The thundering surprise of his voice’s bursts
Would be our death.””
I do not have these fears when I pray to you;
I make other vows than these sons of Israel,
And full of confidence, humbly I cry out
With your Samuel:
“”Whatever you are the only one whom here below I dread,
It is you alone whom here below I wish to hear:
Speak then, O my God! your servant is listening,
And wants to obey you.””
I want neither Moses to teach me your ways,
Nor some other prophet to explain your laws;
It is you who instruct them, it is you who send them,
Whose voice I seek.
As it is from you alone that they all have these lights
By whose grace through them our faith is enlightened,
You can well without them all give them to me entire,
But they all nothing without you.
They can repeat the sound of your words,
But it is not in them to confer the spirit of them,
And their discourses without you pass for so frivolous
That often one laughs at them.
Let them speak proudly, let them say wonders,
Let them declare your order with full vigor:
If you do not speak, they strike the ears
Without moving the heart.
They sow the word obscure, simple and bare;
But in the obscurity you make the eye clairvoyant,
And join from the height of heaven to the letter that kills
The life-giving spirit.
Their mouth under the enigma announces the mystery,
But you make us see the most hidden sense of it;
They preach your laws to us, but your help makes us do
All that they have preached,
They show the way, but you give the strength
To carry all our steps there, to walk there to the end;
And all that comes from them does not pass the bark,
But you penetrate all.
They water without you only the outsides of the soul,
But its fertility wants your sovereign arm;
And all that enlightens it, and all that inflames it
Comes only from your hand.
These prophets in the end may cry out and say,
They are only voices, they are only cries,
If to profit from them the spirit that inspires them
Does not touch our spirits.
Silence then, Moses! and you, speak in his place,
Eternal, immutable, immense truth:
Speak, let me not die sunk in the ice
Of my sterility.
It is indeed to die, if to your celestial favor
We render not as fruit more ardent desires;
And the advice from outside has nothing but what is fatal
If it does not warm within.
This advice listened to only by caprice,
Known without being loved, believed without being observed,
It is what truly kills, and on which your justice
Condemns a reprobate.
Speak then, O my God! your faithful servant
To listen to your voice gathers all his senses,
And finds the sweetnesses of eternal life
In its divine accents.
Speak to console my troubled soul;
Speak to lead it to some amendment;
Speak, so that your glory thus more exalted
May grow eternally.
Pierre Corneille
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-let-truth-speak-within-the-heart-pierre-corneille/