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Why do you pierce my soul so with your glances?
Lower, oh! lower your eyes full of a chaste flame:
Lower them, or I die.
Come rather, rise! Put your hand in mine,
Let my rounded arm encircle and support you
On these carpets of flowers.
……………………………………..
On the shores of an azure lake there is a hill
Whose verdant brow gently inclines
To contemplate the waters;
The gaze of the sun caresses it all day,
And the breath of the wave makes float ceaselessly there
The shadows of the branches.
Encircling with its folds two oaks that it embraces,
A wild vine entwines itself around their branches,
And, crowning their brows,
With its pale verdure lightens their foliage,
Then over fields cut by light and shade
Runs in laughing festoons.
There, in the hollowed flanks of an overhanging rock,
Opens a dark grotto, a nest where the dove
Loves to moan with love;
The vine, the fig tree, veil it, carpet it,
And the rays of the sky, which slowly slip into it,
Measure out the day there.
The night and the coolness of these discreet shadows
Preserve longer for the pale violets
Their timid colors;
A plaintive spring dwells in its vault,
And seems on your brows to distill drop by drop
Chords and tears.
The gaze, through this curtain of greenery,
Sees nothing but the sky and the water it turns azure;
And on the breast of the waters
The fisherman’s sails, which, covering his skiff,
Cleave this limpid sky, and beat like the wing
Of swift birds.
The ear hears nothing but a vague plaintive sound
That, like a long kiss, murmurs on its shore,
Or the voice of the zephyrs,
Or the cadenced sounds that Philomela moans,
Or the echo of the rock, whose sigh mingles
With our own sighs.
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-love-song-iv-alphonse-de-lamartine/