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Pour blood! strike again!
No matter how many branches you lop off,
The more the sacred trunk sees bloom
Its ever-new shoots!
Is it a god who deceives crime?
Always from an august victim
Blood is fertile in avengers!
Always escaped from Athaliah
Some child whom the sword forgets
Grows in the shadow of the Lord!
The child of the miracle is born!
Heir to the blood of a martyr,
He is born of a late oracle,
He is born of a last sigh!
At the sound of the bronze that thunders
France awakens and is astonished
At the fruit that death has borne!
Sport of fate! divine marvels!
Thus there blooms on ruins
A lily that the storm has planted.
He comes when peoples, victims
Of the sleep of their leaders,
Wander on the slopes of abysses
Like flocks without shepherds!
Between a past that evaporates,
Toward a future that it ignores,
Man swims in chaos!
Doubt confuses his compass,
The world awaits a word,
The earth needs a hero!
Courage! it is thus they are born!
It is thus that in his goodness
A god sows them! They appear
On days of barrenness!
Thus, in a holy waiting,
When the wandering troop of shepherds
Spoke of a new Moses,
Tearing the veil from the night,
A mysterious star
Led them toward a cradle!
Sacred cradle! frail hope
That a mother holds in her arms!
Already you reassure France,
Miracles do not deceive!
Confident in its delirium,
To this cradle already my lyre
Opens a triumphant future;
And, like those kings of the Dawn,
An instinct that my soul ignores
Makes me adore a child!
Like the orphan of Pergamon,
He will see near his cradle
A king, princes, a woman,
Weep also over a tomb!
Rocked on his mother’s breast,
If he comes to ask for his father,
He will see their eyes lower!
And that inconsolable widow,
Hiding the mausoleum from him,
With her finger will point him to the heavens!
Cast upon the decline of the ages,
He will see the endless empire,
Issued from glorious storms,
Still tremble at its decline.
But his sword on the fields of victory
Will recall to us the memory
Of the destinies promised to Clovis,
As long as the fragment of a sword,
Struck by a ray of glory,
Would shine in the hands of his sons!
Deaf to the effeminate lessons
With which the century loves to nourish them,
He will know that destinies
Make a king, to reign or to die;
That of the old heroes of his race
The first title was daring,
And the first throne a shield,
And that in vain humanity cries out
The blood shed for the fatherland
Is always the purple of kings!
Trembling at the voice of history,
That living judge of humans,
Frenchmen! he will know that glory
Holds two torches in her hands.
One, with a bloody light,
Furrows the horrible career
Of peoples made happy by crime;
Like the torches of the Furies
That formerly the famous impious ones
Dragged after them in their steps!
The other, from the dark oblivion of the ages,
Tomb of peoples and kings,
Saves only the wise centuries,
And legitimate exploits:
Its immense and pure clarities,
Crossing the future races,
Will unite with eternal day;
Like those peaceful fires,
O Vesta! that chaste hands
Kept burning on your altar!
He will know that in the days in which we live,
To grow old on the throne of kings,
One must show to the eyes of men
One’s virtues beside one’s rights;
That seated at this supreme degree,
One must defend oneself there,
Like the gods on their altars;
Recall their image in all things,
And make adored the cloud
That separates them from mortals!
At the foot of the centuries-old throne
Where another Nestor sits,
The wave of the popular storm,
Though calmed, still murmurs!
This just man, whom heaven contemplates,
Will show him by his example
How, cast upon the reefs,
One raises on the shore,
With the debris of the shipwreck,
A temple to immortality!
Thus on my lyre were explained
The destinies present to my eyes;
And everything seconded my delirium,
And on the earth, and in the heavens!
The gentle gaze of hope
Illuminated the mourning of France:
As, after a long night,
Emerging from a cradle of shadows,
The dawn effaces the funeral steps
Of the dark shadow that flees.
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-on-the-birth-of-the-duke-of-bordeaux-alphonse-de-lamartine/