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It was the singing hour when, gentler than the dawn,
The day, expiring, seems still to smile,
And lets the zephyr sleeping beneath the branches
Descend with the shadow and drift upon the waters;
The bell in the tower, slowly swayed,
Rolled its long sighs from valley to valley,
Like a voice of evening that, dying on the waves,
Calls nature back to rest before the night.
The villagers, scattered around their cottages,
Kept time to its sounds with their rustic prayers,
Re-lit while singing the flame of their hearths,
Hung their nets on the trunks of the poplars,
Or, unyoking their proud bulls,
Scattered before them the savory gold of the sheaves;
Then, seated in silence at the threshold of their homes,
They awaited sleep, that sweet price of their days.
Two children of the hamlet, one a shepherd of the grove,
The other a young fisherman of the stormy shore,
Consecrating to love the idle hour of evening,
Had come to sit in the shade of the same tree;
There, to enjoy the coolness at the foot of the sycamore,
Each had led the maiden he adores:
Naeaera and Naela, two young sisters, two lilies
That a single breath had gathered on the same stem.
The two lovers, lying at the knees of the shepherdesses,
Watched them braid the stems of ferns.
A grassy mound, sown with anemones,
Spread beneath the slope a perfumed carpet;
The sea caressed it with its plaintive waves;
Twelve oaks, bending their old trunks over its banks,
Let only half show beneath their leaves
The blue of the firmament in its sleeping flood.
A tree whose foliage the vine entwined
Poured over them the coolness of its moving shade;
And not far behind them, in a field already ripe,
Where the vine shoot and the maple intertwined their wall,
They heard the sound of the uneven breeze
Fall, rise again, moan at intervals,
And, reviving the airs lulled by the day,
Glide murmuring between the gold of the ears of grain.
They disputed between themselves the sweet cares of their life;
Each found his lot the most enviable:
The humble shepherd praised the gentle care of flocks,
The fisherman his skiff and the charm of the waters;
When an old man said to them with a gentle smile:
– Sing what the fields or the wave inspire in you!
Sing! The one of the two whose touching voice
Can best make one love the waves or the woods,
From the hands of the mistress to whom his voice is dear
Shall receive the sweet prize of his songs: Naeaera,
Offering to her lover the prize of the reapers,
To her last sheaf will attach flowers;
And Naela, braiding the roses she knots,
Will crown the prow of the fisherman’s skiff,
And its mast all day, in the eyes of the sailors,
Will perfume the waves with her floating bouquets.
Thus said the old man. They consent in silence:
The handsome fisherman ponders, and the shepherd begins.
THE SHEPHERD.
When the star of spring, in the cradle of a pure day,
Lifts half its brow in the changing azure;
When the dawn, exhaling its morning breath,
Spreads the sweet perfumes with which the valley is full,
And, making the calyx of the flowers bow,
Lets the tears of night pour out upon the meadows,
Then when the lively messenger of morning,
The lark, leaving its bed in the fern,
And modulating airs gay as the awakening,
Mounts, hovers and warbles before the sun:
Seizing my bulls by their slipping horn,
I bend beneath the yoke their bellowing head,
With knots twelve times redoubled on their brows,
I bind to the polished wood their coupled limbs;
The shining steel ring chains them to the shaft,
I entwine on their yoke long garlands of oak,
Whose moving leaf and floating branches
Protect their nostrils from the heat of noon.
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-le-pasteur-et-le-pecheur-alphonse-de-lamartine/