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The sun of our days pales from its dawn,
On our languid brows it barely casts yet
A few trembling rays that fight the night;
The shadow grows, the day dies, all fades and all flees!
Let another at this sight shudder and be moved,
Let him recoil trembling from the brink of the precipice,
Let him not be able from afar to hear without a shudder
The sad song of the dead about to resound,
The stifled sighs of a lover or a brother
Suspended over the edges of his funeral bed,
Or the groaning bronze, whose frantic sounds
Announce to mortals that a wretched one is no more!
I greet you, O death! Celestial liberator,
You do not appear to me under that deadly aspect
That dread or error long lent you;
Your arm is not armed with a destructive sword,
Your brow is not cruel, your eye is not treacherous,
A merciful God guides you to the aid of sorrows;
You do not annihilate, you deliver! your hand,
Celestial messenger, bears a divine torch;
When my weary eye closes to the light,
You come to flood my eyelid with a purer day;
And hope near you, dreaming on a tomb,
Leaning on faith, opens to me a fairer world!
Come then, come detach my bodily chains,
Come, open my prison; come, lend me your wings,
Why do you delay? Appear; let me leap at last
Toward that unknown being, my principle and my end!
Who detached me from it? who am I, and what must I be?
I die and do not know what it is to be born.
You, whom I question in vain, spirit, unknown host,
Before animating me, what sky did you inhabit?
What power cast you onto this fragile globe?
What hand enclosed you in your prison of clay?
By what astonishing knots, by what secret relations
Does the body hold to you as you hold to the body?
What day will separate the soul from matter?
For what new palace will you leave the earth?
Have you forgotten everything? Beyond the tomb,
Will you be reborn again in a new oblivion?
Will you begin a similar life?
Or in the bosom of God, your source and your homeland,
Freed forever from your mortal bonds,
Will you at last enjoy your eternal rights?
Yes, such is my hope, O half of my life!
It is through it that already my strengthened soul
Has been able to see without fear on your enchanting features
The brilliant colors of spring fade.
It is through it that, pierced by the dart that tears me,
Still young, dying you will see me smile,
And that tears of joy at our last farewells,
At your last look, will shine in my eyes.
“Vain hope!” will cry the herd of Epicurus,
And he whose hand, dissecting nature,
In a corner of the newly described brain,
Sees matter think and spirit vegetate;
Fool! they will say, whom too much pride abuses,
Look around you: everything begins and everything wears out,
Everything moves toward an end, and everything is born to die;
In these yellowing meadows you see the flower languish;
You see in these forests the cedar with its superb brow
Under the weight of its years fall, crawl beneath the grass;
In their dried-up beds you see the seas run dry;
The heavens themselves, the heavens begin to pale;
This star whose birth time has hidden,
The sun, like us, marches to its decadence,
And in the deserted heavens mortals in panic
Will seek it one day and will see it no more!
You see around you in all of nature
The centuries piling dust upon dust,
And time, confounding your pride with a single step,
Becoming the coffin of all that it produces.
And man, and man alone, O sublime folly!
At the bottom of his tomb believes he finds life again,
And in the whirlwind carried into nothingness.
Struck down by time, dreams of eternity!
Let another answer you, O sages of the earth!
Leave me my error: I love, I must hope;
Our feeble reason is troubled and confounded.
Yes, reason is silent: but Instinct answers you.
As for me, even if I saw in the celestial plains
The stars, straying from their certain paths,
In the fields of ether striking one another,
Wandering at random through the terrified heavens;
Even if I heard the earth groan and break apart;
Even if I saw its globe wandering and solitary
Floating far from the suns, weeping for destroyed man,
Losing itself in the fields of eternal night;
And even if, last witness of these funeral scenes,
Surrounded by chaos, death, and darkness,
I alone were standing: alone, despite my dread,
Infallible and good Being, I would hope in you,
And, certain of the return of the eternal dawn,
Over the destroyed worlds, I would still wait for you!
Often, you remember, in that happy abode
Where our immortal love was born from a glance,
Sometimes on the summits of these ancient rocks,
Sometimes on the deserted shores of melancholy lakes,
On the wing of desire, carried far from the world,
I plunged with you into those obscurities.
The shadows with long folds descending from the mountains,
For a moment hid the countryside from our eyes
But soon advancing without brilliance and without noise
The mysterious choir of the stars of night,
Giving back to our view the objects veiled,
Clothed the expanse with its soft glimmers;
Thus, in our holy temples lit by day,
When the evening rays pale by degrees,
The lamp, spreading its pious light,
Fills the sanctuary with a more recollected day.
In your intoxication then you turned my eyes,
From the heavens to the earth, and from the earth to the heavens;
Hidden God, you said, nature is your temple!
The spirit sees you everywhere when our eye contemplates it;
Of your perfections, which it seeks to conceive,
This world is the reflection, the image, the mirror;
Day is your gaze, beauty your smile
Everywhere the heart adores you and the soul breathes you;
Eternal, infinite, all-powerful and all-good,
These vast attributes do not complete your name;
And the spirit, overwhelmed beneath your sublime essence,
Celebrates your greatness even in its silence.
And yet, O God! by its sublime law,
This cast-down spirit still leaps toward you,
And feeling that love is the end of its being,
Impatient to love, burns to know you.
You said: and our hearts united their sighs
Toward that unknown being attested by our desires;
Kneeling before him, loving him in his works,
Both dawn and evening brought him our homage,
And our enraptured eyes contemplated in turn
The earth our exile, and the heaven his dwelling.
Ah! if in those moments when the fugitive soul
Leaps forth and wants to break the breast that captivates it,
This God, from the height of heaven answering our vows,
With a liberating dart had struck us both!
Our souls, with a single bound rising back toward their source,
Together would have crossed the worlds in their course
Through the infinite, on the wing of love,
They would have risen like a ray of day,
And, reaching God himself in ecstasy,
Would have been merged in his bosom forever!
Did these vows deceive us? Destined for nothingness,
Is it for nothingness that beings are born?
Sharing the fate of the body that conceals it,
In the night of the tomb does the soul engulf itself?
Does it fall into dust? or, ready to fly away,
Like a sound that is no more will it exhale?
After a vain sigh, after the supreme farewell
Of all that loved you, is there nothing more that loves you?
Ah! on this great secret question only yourself!
See what loves you die, Elvire, and answer me!
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-immortality-alphonse-de-lamartine/