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Ah! if I had words,
Images, symbols,
To paint what I feel!
If my tongue, entangled
To reveal my thought,
Could create accents!
Holy and mysterious law!
A melodious soul
Animates the whole universe;
Each being has its harmony,
Each star its genius,
Each element its concerts.
They have but one voice, yet pure,
Strong as nature,
Sublime as its God;
And, though always the same,
Lord, this supreme voice
Makes itself heard in every place.
When the winds whistle on the wave,
When the sea moans or roars,
When the thunder resounds,
Ignorant as we are,
Who among us, children of men,
Asks what they have said?
One has said: “Magnificence!”
Another: “Immensity! power!”
Another: “Terror and wrath!”
One has fled before his face,
Another has said: “His shadow passes:
Heavens and earth, be silent!”
But man, your creature,
He who understands nature,
To speak has only words,
Words without life and without wing,
Of his immortal thought
Too perishable echoes!
His soul is like the storm
That rumbles in the cloud
And cannot burst forth,
Like the captive wave
That beats and whitens its shore
And cannot overcome it.
It wears away and consumes itself
Like an eaglet whose feather
Would not yet have grown,
Whose eye aspires to its sphere,
And who crawls on the earth
Like a numb reptile.
Ah! what I envy in the angels
Is not eternal life,
Nor their glorious destiny:
It is the lyre, it is the organ
By which even a profane heart
Can sing the endless hymn!
Something in me sighs,
As sweet as the zephyr
That the night lets exhale,
As sublime as the wave,
Or as the thunder that rumbles;
And my heart cannot speak!
Ocean, who on your shores
Spreads your plaintive waves,
Murmuring branches of the woods,
Lightning whose cloud is full,
Streams with soft breath,
Ah! if I had your voice!
If only, O my soul,
This God whose love inflames you
Like fire, the north wind,
To the ardent zeal that burns in you
Granted, in an ecstasy,
A word to say his name!
His name, such as nature
Without speech murmurs it,
Such as the heavens know it;
This name that the dawn veils,
And of which star to star
Is the melodious echo;
The hurricanes, the thunder,
The seas, the fires and the earth,
Would fall silent to listen to it;
The airs, delighted to hear it,
Would stop to learn it,
The heavens to repeat it.
This name alone, repeated without ceasing,
Would lift my sadness
In this valley of sorrows;
And I would say without complaining:
“My last day may fade,
I have said his glory, and I die!”
Alphonse de Lamartine
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-desire-alphonse-de-lamartine/