Canticles, Poem by Emile Verhaeren

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

I would possess, to tell your splendors,
The triumphal plainchant of waves upon the sands,
Or the giant lungs of inexhaustible winds;

I would master the heavy rumbling echoes,
That cast, in the night, strange words,
To make them cry out and proclaim your praises;

I would that the whole sea sang,
And, like a weight, the world raised up its tide,
To tell you superb and to set you sacred;

I would that your name blazed in the sky,
Like a wandering fire and rolled, from star to star,
With the noises of storm and the crashes of disaster.

The feet with bronze claws and the eyes wide open,
Like great lizards, drinking the gold of the lights,
My long green desires drag themselves toward your body.

At blazing noon, in the customary hours,
I have laid you down, at the edge of a field, in the sun;
Nearby, a burning patch of mixed grain shivers,

The air holds over our loves a suspended heat,
The Scheldt sinks in the distance like a silver path,
And the gilded sky stretches out the expanse.

And you stretch out, lascivious and giant, uprising,
Like great lizards drinking the gold of the lights,
My desires returned to their first ardors.

III

And my love will be the sumptuous sun,
That will clothe in torrid summer and in languors
The clear and naked slopes of your mountainous body,

It will shed its light upon you in caresses,
And the touches of this new blaze
Will be tongues of gold that lick your skin.

You will be the beauty of the day, you will be the dawn
And the redness of tragic and swelling evenings;
You will make of brightnesses and splendors your robe,

Your flesh will be like the fabulous marbles,
That sang, in the deserts, grandiose songs,
When the morning burned their blocks with apotheoses.

Hieratically upright over the world, Love!
Great God, clothed in red in your sacred splendors,
Toward you, humanity rises like the day,

Rises like the winds and like the tides;
We magnify you, Love, young and russet God,
Who breaks upon our brows your lightning bolts of wrath,

But who also shoots into the depths of our marrow,
The electric shudder of eternal pleasure,
And we contemplate you, beneath your solemn sky,

Where hearts bitten with gold flame instead of stars,
Where the moon rounds its orb into a vermilion breast,
Where the flesh of Venus sets lakes of sun.

Emile Verhaeren

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