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People! For the crimes of your fathers
Heaven, punishing your children,
With hereditary chastisements
Will crush their descendants!
Until a propitious hand
Raises up the august edifice
By which the earth touches the heavens,
And zeal and prayer
Dispel the unworthy dust
That covers the image of the gods!
Come forth from your ancient ruins,
Temples that Israel wept for;
Rise again, sacred porticoes;
Levites, ascend to the altar!
To the sounds of the harps of Solyma,
Let the reborn victim
Immulate itself beneath your chaste hands!
And with the tears of the earth
Let its blood extinguish the thunder
That still rumbles over mankind!
Full of a superb folly,
This people with the audacious brow
Said to itself one day: “God humbles me;
Let us be gods to ourselves.
Our sublime intelligence
Has sounded the sky and the abyss
To seek there that great spirit!
But neither in the flanks of the earth,
But neither in the fires of the sphere,
His name for us was not written.
“Already we teach the world
To break the scepter of kings;
Already our profound audacity
Laughs at the worn-out yoke of laws.
Shake off, wretched slaves,
Shake off unworthy fetters.
Return to your liberty!
Mortal! from the day you breathe,
Your law is what you desire;
Your duty is pleasure!
“Your thought has crossed space,
Your calculations precede the times,
The lightning yields to your audacity,
The heavens roll your floating chariots;
Like a fire that everything feeds,
Your reason, ceaselessly growing,
Will extend over immensity!
And your power, which it secures,
Will have no term and no measure
But space and eternity.
“Happy our sons! happy that age
Which, fertilized by our lessons,
Will come to gather the inheritance
Of the dogmas we leave to it!
Why do jealous years
Bound our destinies
To such rapid instants?
O law too unjust and too harsh!
To triumph over nature
What did we lack? Time.”
Well then! time upon your dust
Has scarcely yet taken a step!
Come forth, O manes of our fathers,
Come forth from the night of death!
Come contemplate your work!
Come share in this age’s
Glory and felicity!
O race fruitful in promises,
Appear! benefactors of the world,
Here is your posterity!
What do I see? They turn away their gaze,
And, hiding beneath their rags,
Their crowd, bewildered with shame,
Flees and returns into the tombs!
No, no, stay, guilty shadows;
Authors of our deplorable days,
Stay! this torment is too gentle.
Heaven, too slow to pursue you,
Should have condemned you to live
In the century begotten by you!
Where are they, those days when France,
At the head of the nations,
Rose like an immense star
Flooding everything with its rays?
Among our centuries, unique century,
With what magnificent cortege
Glory composed your court!
Like the god who enlightens us,
Your grandeur astonished the earth,
Whose love your clarities were!
Always the centuries of genius
Are therefore the centuries of virtues!
Always the gods of harmony
Have descended for heroes!
Near the throne that inspires them,
See them lay down the lyre
In pure and chaste hands,
And the Racines and the Turennes
Chain the graces of Athens
To the triumphant chariot of the Romans!
But, O decline! what arid breath
Has dried the flowers of our age?
What! the heavy compass of Euclid
Stifles our enchanting arts!
Impulses of the soul and of genius!
The cold mania of calculations
In our fathers replaced you.
They placed upon nature
The icy finger that measures it,
And nature froze!
And you, priestess of the earth,
Virgin of Pindus or of Zion,
You flee this globe of matter,
Deprived of your last ray!
Your divine breath withdraws
From these withered hearts, which the lyre
No longer stirs with its touching sounds!
And for its God who contemplates it,
Without you the universe is a temple
That has no more perfumes or songs!
Let us weep then, children of our fathers!
Let us weep! let us cover our brows with mourning!
Let us wash in our bitter tears
So many irreparable affronts!
Like the sons of Heliodorus,
Let us gather from evening to dawn
The debris of the fallen temple!
And beneath these criminal ashes
Let us still seek the sparks
Of genius and of virtue!
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-ode-alphonse-de-lamartine/