Stances – How I Love to See, Poem by Alfred De Musset

Poem by Alfred De Musset Collection Early PoemsPeriod 19th century

How I love to see, in the valley
Desolate,
Rise like a mausoleum
The four wings of a black monastery!
How I love to see, near the austere
Monastery,
At the threshold of the feudal baron,
The white cross and the holy water font!

You, of the ancient Pyrenees
The eldest,
Old fleshless churches,
Gaunt and sad monuments,
You whom time could not dissolve,
Nor the lightning,
Of some great mountains reduced to dust
Are you not the bones?

I love your gray-headed towers,
Where breaks
The lightning that passes with the breeze,
I love your deep staircases
That, swirling in the entrails
Of the walls,
To the resounding hymn of the flock
Make all the pillars answer!

Oh! when the hurricane that gains
The countryside,
Seizes the mountain by the hair,
When autumn time turns it yellow,
How I love, in the wood that cries
And bends,
The old bell towers of the abbey,
Like two trees of granite!

How I love to see, in the vespers
Empurpled,
Burst forth in dappled veins
The golden rose windows of the convents!
Oh! how I love, on the Gothic vaults
Of the porticoes,
The old athletic stone saints
Praying softly for the living!

Alfred De Musset

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-how-i-love-to-see-alfred-de-musset/