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Iron roads toward the horizon:
Blocks of ash, banks of shale,
Where on the edges a sad lamb
Grazes the blades of an old lawn;
Sudden departures toward the suburbs,
Rails that ring, signals that move,
And all at once the passing of the raw
And bleeding eyes of a red convoy;
Shrill calls, black hurricanes,
Land of tawny fires and tragic factories,
Where sob, when evening comes,
All the voices of the wind
Striking, with a moaning refrain,
The endless wires of telegraphic horsehair,
It is among you
Who surround the cities,
That come seeking asylum
The burst brains of dreamers and madmen.
Marked each with a sign,
Behind a blind and deaf wall
Of old suburb,
The huts line up;
And the burning and terrible city, over there,
Which peoples them from top to bottom,
With the keen eyes of those haggard windows
Worries about them and watches them.
O madness and its suns, suddenly white!
O madness and its suns weighing down
With slow rays,
With dull rays,
Sinisterly,
Modern fever and toil!
Once all the unknown was peopled with gods,
They were the answer to the questions whose sum
Man in his childish soul drew up;
They were strong since they were silent;
And prayer and blasphemy
Which resolved nothing
Yet decided, in the name of evil, in the name of good,
The supreme problems.
But today it is reality
Still secret, but nonetheless enclosed
In the perpetual and rhythmic course of things,
That one wants, with tenacity,
To grasp, in order to order life and its beauty,
According to causes.
Man rises at last for this belated duty,
Come to eclipse the fires of all the others;
He affirms himself no longer the king, the valiant, the apostle,
But the stubborn thinker, ardent and sickly
Who burns his nerves to seize, in passing,
Every riddle that gleams and flees — moment of lightning.
Doubts, certainties, labors, excavations, voyages,
The whole earth resounds with his clear step
And the attentive night listens to his vigils burn;
The new order is created with such care
To fix well its summit and its tenons and its mortises
That there is nothing more beneath the great roofs of his syntheses
That is not supported and does not support too.
And all that labors in the four corners of the world
Struggles, eyes fixed on this profound work
That research carries on — and the earth and the heavens,
And those who traffic in the name of gold and those
Who ravage in the name of blood, all collaborate,
With their hatred or their love, toward the sacred goal.
From every hour of the century a prodigy is wrung
And you provoke them, researchers! Everything is held tight,
Meshes of life or of matter between your subtle fingers;
Your human miracles illuminate the cities
And the unknown would be tamed and knowledge,
With great giant steps, would have caught up with hope,
If your brains beaten by the wind of conquest
Did not wear out your thin ascetic bodies with too much thinking
And if your nerves, ever strained and ever weary,
One day, like cords, did not burst.
Emile Verhaeren
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-madness-emile-verhaeren/