The Dead Woman, Poem by Emile Verhaeren

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

In her dress, the color of fire and poison,
The corpse of my reason
Drags along the Thames.

Bronze bridges, where wagons
Clash with endless rumbling of hinges,
And the sails of dark boats
Let their shadows fall upon her.

Without a needle moving on its dial,
A great belfry masked in red
Watches her, like something
Immensely sad and dead.

She died of knowing too much,
Of wanting too much to sculpt the cause
Into the black granite base
Of every being and every thing.
She died, atrociously,
Of a learned poisoning,
She died also of a delirium
For an absurd and red empire.

Her nerves burst,
Like an evening lit by festival,
When she already felt triumph floating
Like eagles above her head.
She died, able to bear no more,
The ardor and the will ground down,
And it is she who killed herself,
Infinitely exhausted.

Along the funeral walls,
Along the iron factories
Whose hammers tan the lightning,
She drags herself to the funeral.

There are quays and barracks,
Quays forever and their lanterns,
Motionless and slow spinners
Of the dark golds of their lights;
There are sadnesses of stone,
Brick houses, black keeps
Whose windows, dreary eyelids,
Open in the evening fog;
There are great yards of frenzy,
Full of dismantled boats
And yardarms torn apart
On a sky of crucifixion.

In her dress of dead jewels, solemnized
By the purple hour on the horizon,
The corpse of my reason
Drags along the Thames.

She goes toward the hazards
Deep in shadow and fog,
To the long dull sound of heavy tocsin bells,
Breaking their wing at the corner of towers.
Behind her, leaving unsatisfied
The immense city of life;
She goes toward the black unknown
To sleep in tombs of evening,
There below, where the slow and strong waves,
Opening their limitless holes,
Swallow for all eternity:
The dead women.

Emile Verhaeren

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