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… I have lived; that is to say, unknown to myself
My mother, groaning, cast me forth weak and naked;
I have counted in the sky the setting and the dawn
Of a star that descends to rise again,
And which man, who wears himself out counting them in vain,
Awaits, always deceived, always a tomorrow;
My soul has, for some days, animated with its life
A little of this mire snatched from these furrows,
That repugned to live and tended toward death,
Made an eternal effort to dissolve itself,
And which through pain I barely held back;
Pain! fatal knot, mysterious chain,
That in astonished man unites for a day
Two natures struggling in a contrary love
And each of which apart would be worthy of envy,
The one in its nothingness and the other in its life,
If life and death are not the same, alas!
Two words created by man and which God does not hear?
Now this bond that each of them accuses,
Ready to break at last under the pain that wears it,
Lets vanish like a light dream
The inexplicable whole that wants to divide itself;
I will not attempt to rejoin its thread,
I abandon to their chance both my senses and my soul:
Let them go where God knows, each on its own side!
Farewell, fleeing world! nature, humanity,
Vain form of being, shadow of a meteor,
We know each other too well to deceive ourselves again!
Yes, I know you too well, O life! …
How well you know how to gild your magical distance!
How beautiful is the horizon of your laughing morning!
When first love and fresh hope
Half-open for us the space where our soul darts forth
Carrying with it only innocence and beauty,
And when with a single object our enchanted heart
Says like Romeo: “No, it is not the dawn!
Let us love always! the bird has not yet sung!”
All man’s happiness is in this single instant;
The path of our days is green only as we climb!
From this point of life where one feels its end
One sees all it contains vanish;
Hope takes flight again toward the Orient;
At the bottom of everything one finds void and nothingness;
Before having tasted, the soul is satiated;
Even in that love which can create life
One hears a voice: You create to die!
And the kiss of fire feels a shudder run through it!
When happiness has no more distance or mystery,
When the golden cloud leaves this earth bare,
When life has once lost its error,
When it no longer lies, happiness is done for!
… Ah! if you appeared without shadow and without emblem,
Source of light and you light itself,
Soul of the infinite, who shines from yourself!
If, struck by only a ray of your faith,
We reflected you in our intelligence,
Like a dark sea in which swims an immense disk,
Everything would vanish before this pure sun,
Like shadow in the morning, like a dream on waking;
Everything would evaporate under the ray of flame,
Matter, and spirit, and forms, and soul,
Everything would be for our eyes, in your pure clarity,
What the pale image is to reality!
Life, in your aspect, would no longer be life,
It would rise triumphant and ravished,
Or, if your will compressed its transport,
It would be nothing more than an eternal death!
Despite the thick veil that hides you from my sight,
There, there is my ill! it is your thirst that kills me!
My soul is toward you only an eternal sigh,
A vigil that nothing can ever soothe;
I die of not being able to name what I adore,
And if you appear to me! you see, I die again!
And at last convinced of my impotence,
Here I am! asking whether I have ever lived,
Touching the obscure term of my short years,
Counting my lost steps and my struck hours,
As surprised to be alive, as empty, as naked,
As the day when one says: A child has come to me!
Ready to return beneath the grass, to run dry, to fall silent,
Like the trickle of water that, sprung from the earth,
Returns there anew swallowed by the earth
A few steps from the soil from which it had come!
Only, this water flees without knowing it flows;
This sand does not know where the wave rolls it;
They have neither feeling, nor murmur, nor tears,
And I, I live enough to feel that I am dying!
To die! ah! that single word makes life horrifying!
Is eternity worth an hour of agony?
Pain precedes us, and gives us birth into the day,
Pain gives us birth into death in its turn!
I no longer measure the time it leaves me,
As I measured it, in my green youth,
By adding to the days long days to come,
But, by subtracting them from my short future,
I say: One day more, one day less; the dawn
Takes from me one of those that still remained;
I no longer await them, as in my morning,
Full, brilliant, and gilded with rays from the distance,
But dull, but paled, discolored and empty
Like a cracked urn whose arid sides
Let the water of heaven escape that man seeks there in vain,
Past without memory, present without tomorrow,
And I know that the day is like the eve,
And the morning has no more voice to wake me,
And I envy the tomb the long sleep it sleeps,
And my soul is already sad as death!
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-my-soul-is-sad-unto-death-alphonse-de-lamartine/