October Rays (I)

Poem by Charles-Nérée Beauchemin Collection ArrayPeriod 19th century

Glorious October smiles upon nature.
One would think summer revives the bushes.
A cool wind, saturated with the scent of faded woods,
Makes its shivers run over the grass and the waters.

The cloud has sown the gloomy horizons
With its silver flakes. On the edge of the meadows,
The last autumn fruits, with green and pink reflections,
Shine through the mottled branches.

Green forest turning to the warm tones of orange;
Streams where trembles a sky like the vernal sky;
Mountains with slopes bathed in a strange light.
What a picture! what a brilliant autumnal landscape!

Halfway up the hill, over there, the sunlit farm,
With its pointed roof fringed with hops,
Seems quite laughing and as if amazed
At its russet stubble and its blond thatch.

In the rays that dazzle his oblique gaze,
The grandfather comes to sit on the familiar front step:
His flesh rejoices in a renewed warmth,
In the old man’s winter, it is less cold, less dark.

Calm and gentle, sighing toward a distant autumn,
He drinks life with the air of the fields and woods,
And this sparkling renewal that astonishes him
Breathes into his heart the love of tender bygone days.

With his delicate feet pressing the swing,
A young child grows drunk on the rhythmic rocking,
Like in gentleness the violet flower
That the shrub sways in the warm May wind.

Near an old wooden bridge collapsed on the bank,
A troop of children with pure and clear laughter,
Watches, on the pebbles that a dormant wave submerges,
The strident and nimble teal that cleaves the air.

Toward the wells whose moss has greened the curb,
The washerwomen go with the reapers;
Under this pale firmament there bursts forth more brightly
The springtime charm of the giggling couples.

And while their tender babble murmurs,
One sees them unrolling the metal chain
Of the wet winches, descend and ascend and descend
The bucket from which streams a crystal wave.

Charles-Nérée Beauchemin

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