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The world is throbbing with trains and ships.
From East to West, from South to North,
Striding and violent,
They come and go;
And their signals and their whistles tear
Dawn, day, evening, night;
And their enormous, transversal smoke
Bars the colossal cities
And the plain and the shore and the waves and the skies.
And the muffled thunder of their rolling axles,
And the hoarse, panting noise of their boilers
Make the earth shudder, in tumultuous strokes of gongs,
Here, over there, everywhere, to its very depths.
And the labor of arms and the effort of brains
And the work of hands and the flight of thoughts,
Interweave around the marvelous networks
Drawn by the impulse of trains and vessels,
Across the immense and anguished expanse.
And cities of flame and shadow, on the horizon,
And stations of glass and iron rise up,
And great ports built for struggle or for dream
Round their moles and raise their bridges;
And lighthouses whose gleams suddenly turn
Illuminate the night and row upon the sea;
And here is Marseille, Hamburg, Glasgow, Antwerp,
And over there Bombay, Singapore and Melbourne.
Oh these bright ships and these giant convoys
Loaded with hides, with wood, with fruits, with amber or copper
Across lands of simoom or of frost,
Across the savage or torpid ocean!
Oh these forests in the hold, oh these quarries
That heavy wagons transport, backs bent
And these gilded marbles lovelier than lights
And these cold minerals brighter than poisons,
Motley heap of massive spoils
Come from the Cape, from Sakhalin or from Ceylon,
Around which there stirs in convulsive rages
The whole battle of torrid and virulent gold!
Oh gold! blood of the implacable and modern force;
Marvelous gold, appalling gold, criminal gold,
Gold of thrones, gold of ghettos, gold of altars;
Underground gold whose caverns are the banks
And which dreams, in their flanks, before leaving
On the sea it crosses or on the earth it treads,
To nourish or starve, to exalt or abase
The myriad-minded and red heart of the crowd!
Long ago gold was pure and devoted to the gods.
It was the soul on fire that fermented their thunder.
When their temples emerged white and bare from the dust,
It adorned their peaks and reflected the skies.
In the time of blond heroes, it became legendary;
Siegfried, you came to it in the marine sunset,
And your eyes watched its haloed block,
Glow, like a sun, beneath the green waters of the Rhine
But today gold lives and breathes in man
It is his tenacious faith and his hard axiom,
It prowls, livid lightning, around his madness;
It corrodes his heart, it rots his goodness;
When sudden ruin joins with ruins,
Gold overturns and ravages, like war,
The formidable hope of the cities of the earth.
Yet it is thanks to it
That man, one day, raised his head
So that immensity might be his conquest.
Oh the dazzlement through minds!
The metals that conduct rapid words,
Above the mad winds, beneath the mad sea,
Seem the taut nerves of an immense brain.
Everything seems to obey some new order.
Europe is a forge where the idea is struck.
Races of old lands, forces out of tune,
You knot your scattered destinies, since the time
When gold placed beneath your brows the same beating hope;
Harbors and quays sticky with pitch and resins,
Black warehouses, grinding shipyards, red factories,
Your giant labor tightens its knots in every direction
Since gold on earth blinds the gold of the heavens.
It is the gold of life or the gold of death, it is lyrical gold
That skirts Asia and penetrates Africa;
It is gold beyond the Ocean, migratory gold
Hurled from the white poles toward the tawny equators,
The gold that shines on glories or disasters,
The gold that turns, around the centuries, like the stars;
The unanimous and bright gold that guides, obstinately,
From sea to sea, from continent to continent,
Wherever their mast rises, wherever their rail stretches,
Everywhere! the tamed soaring of trains and ships.
Emile Verhaeren
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-the-conquest-emile-verhaeren/