Dialogue

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th centuryPrint

… Be your own executioner;
Never leave the care of torturing yourself
To anyone, ever. Give your only kiss
To despair; unleash within you the harsh blasphemy;
Force your soul, wear it out against the reef:
The heart’s ills that one exasperates, one commands them;
Life, alas! is only corrected or amended
If the will strikes it down with pride.
Its norm is pain. Alas! who resigns themselves to it?
– Indeed, I want to exacerbate the ills in me.
As formerly the great Christians, bitten by faith,
Tortured themselves with a malignant fervor,
I want to drink sufferings, like a poison
Living and mad; I shall lash with my anguish
My poor days, as a parish tocsin
Exalts itself to scatter mourning over the horizon.

This intimate and bizarre heroism attracts me:
To prepare one’s pain and provoke one’s ill
With relentlessness, and tame the animal
Of misery and fear, which in the heart mirrors itself
Always; to straighten up cruel, but against oneself,
Victorious over something at last, and less languid
And less banally in ecstasy of the void.

– Be your power, be your torment, be your fright.
And then, there are tempting fields of hostility
That men of marble, with strong hands,
Have cultivated; there are terrible paths,
Where their violent cries and their beating marches
Are heard: it is there that, on such a vermilion rock,
Evening lights, in the distance, blood and slaughters
And that shine, among withered lianas,
Scintillating knives of crime and of sun!

Emile Verhaeren

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