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To live clear, firm and just,
With my heart, I admire all
That vibrates, works and boils
In human tenderness and on the august earth.
Winter goes away and here is March and then April
And then early summer, joyful and childish.
On the flowering wisteria that the dew moistens,
Red, green, blue, yellow, brown, vermilion,
The thousand insects
Stir and gather nectar in the sun.
Oh the wonder of their wings that shine
And their bodies fine as a needle
And their legs and their antennae
And their daily grooming
On a blade of grass or of reed!
How precise they are, how agile they are!
Their fragile enameled corselet
Is more changeable than the currents of water;
Thanks to my eyes that reflect them
I feel them live and penetrate into me
A little;
Oh their riots and their games
And their loves and their emotions
And their battle, around the purple clusters!
My heart follows them in their soaring toward the light,
Bits of splendor, crumbs of beauty,
Parcels of gold and dust of life!
I push away from them the unquenched snare:
The glue, the mud and the pursuit of birds
For whole days, I defend their labors;
My art is enamored of their perfect works;
I contemplate the trifles of which their house is made
Their useful and precise gesture, their searching and sure flight,
Their journey in the broad and unveiled light
And when they are lost somewhere, in the blue,
I believe they have gone to mingle with the stars.
But here is shadow and sun on the garden
And wasps vibrating over there, in the light;
Here are the long and clear and sinuous paths
Lined with heavy poppies and hollyhocks;
Even today, at the hour when blond summer spreads
Over the glossy lawns and the tawny hills,
Each petal is like a mauve eyelid
That the light enters and warms while trembling.
The least proud of pistils, the humblest of leaves
Are of a design so pure, so firm and so nervous
That in them
Everything rushes and everything welcomes
The clear and loving homage of the eyes.
The hour of russet Julys has in its turn fled,
And now
Here is the calm sun with the gentle rain
That, softly,
Without tearing the admirable flowers, touches them;
Like them, without picking them, let us bring our mouths near
And may our heart believe, in kissing their beauty
Made of so much joy and so much mystery,
That it kisses, with fervor, delight and voluptuousness,
The very lips of the earth.
The insects, the flowers, the leaves, the branches
Weave their enveloping and tiny life
In my village, around the meadows and the small enclosures.
My little house is caught in their webs.
Often, in the afternoon, before twilight,
From window to window, along the straight gable,
They stir and rustle up to my roof;
Often too, when the star in the West recedes,
I hear so strongly their fever and their emotion
That I feel myself live, with my heart,
As at the center of their ardor.
Then the tender flowers and the frail insects
Envelop me like a million wings
Made of wind, of rain and of light.
My house seems a nest gently coveted
By all that moves and lives in the light.
I admire immensely plenary nature
From the dwarf shrub to the giant sun
A petal, a pistil, a grain of vermilion wheat
Is taken, with respect, between my fingers that love it;
I no longer distinguish the world from myself,
I am the ample foliage and the floating branches,
I am the ground whose pale pebbles I tread
And the grass of the ditches where suddenly I collapse
Drunk and fervent, wild-eyed, happy and sobbing.
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-around-my-house-emile-verhaeren/