Chorus of the Cedars of Lebanon

Poem by Alphonse De Lamartine Collection The Fall of an AngelPeriod 19th century

(Excerpt)

Eagles that pass above our heads,
Go tell the unleashed winds
That we defy their tempests
With our rooted masts.
Let them rise, those tyrants of the wave,
Let their wing riot and thunder
To assail our sinewy arms!
Come on! their most furious whirlwinds
Will only rock our stems
And whistle through our hair!

Sons of the rock, born of ourselves,
His divine hand planted us;
We are the green diadem
That he cast upon the summits of Eden.
When the floodwaters surge,
Our hollow flanks will be the refuge
Of all Adam’s race,
And the patriarch’s children
In our woods will carve the ark
Of Abraham’s nomadic God!

It is we, when the captive tribes
Have seen the heights of Hermon,
Who will cover with our beams
The immense ark of Solomon;
If, later, a Word made man
With a holier name adores and names
His father from the height of a cross,
Altars of this great sacrifice,
For the instrument of his torment
Our branches will furnish the wood.

In memory of these prodigies,
Men bowing their heads
Will come to adore our vestiges,
Press their lips to our trunks.
The saints, the poets, the sages
Will listen in our foliage
To sounds like great waters,
And beneath our prophetic shadows
Will form their most beautiful canticles
From the murmurs of our branches.

Alphonse de Lamartine

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

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