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And I said in my heart: What should be done with life?
Shall I still, following those who went before me,
Like the lamb that passes where its mother passed,
Imitate the immortal folly of mortals?
One seeks on the seas the treasures of Memnon,
And the wave swallows his vows and his ship;
In the bosom of glory to which his genius aspires,
Another dies intoxicated by the echo of a vain name.
With our passions forming its vast fabric,
That one founds a throne, and climbs only to fall;
In gentler snares, loving to succumb,
This one reads his fate in a woman’s eyes.
The lazy man falls asleep in the arms of hunger;
The plowman drives his fertile plow;
The scholar thinks and reads, the warrior strikes and kills;
The beggar sits on the edge of the road.
Where are they going, however? They go where the leaf goes
That the breath of winters drives before it.
Thus will wither in their diverse labors
These generations that time sows and reaps!
They struggled against him, but time has conquered;
As a river swallows the sand of its banks,
I have seen him devour their fleeting shadows.
They were born, they died: Lord, did they live?
As for me, I will sing the master whom I adore,
In the noise of cities, in the peace of deserts,
Lying on the shore, or floating on the seas,
At the setting of the sun, at the awakening of dawn.
The earth cried out to me: Who then is the Lord?
He whose immense soul is everywhere spread,
He whose single step measures the expanse,
He from whom the sun borrows its splendor;
He who from nothingness drew matter,
He who on the void founded the universe,
He who without shore enclosed the seas,
He who with a glance launched the light;
He who knows neither day nor morrow,
He who from all time begets himself,
Who lives in the future as in the present hour,
And recalls the times that have escaped from his hand:
It is he! it is the Lord: let my tongue retell
The hundred names of his glory to the children of mortals.
Like the golden harp hung at his altars,
I will sing for him, until he breaks me…
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-stances-alphonse-de-lamartine/