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Speak, you people, you old people,
May hearts be exalted in your hamlets;
Speak, you people, you old people,
May the light awaken in your windowpanes
That look out on the road,
For the magi with their white cloaks,
For the shepherds with their white flocks,
Are there, emerging and listening
And advancing on the road.
Here is the prince Charlemagne;
And Frederick whose beard does battle
In the wars, in Germany:
And then here is Louis who built Versailles;
Here is the sad prodigal son
Who comes back, with swine and dogs,
From the lands heavy with fatigue;
Here are the black rams that a patriarch,
In distant times, tamed in the ark;
Here are the shepherds of Chaldea
Who contemplated the night with the eyes of their thought,
And those of Flanders and of Zeeland
Who fade into the legend
And the fog, at the far end of the moors.
The strange and solemn procession
And the trains of the long cloaks
And the clatter of knucklebones made by the paws of the flock
Brush and animate the snow.
Up there, the frost rises in tiers like promenades
Dappled with fires, like acids,
And from which the clear and translucent angels
Seem to surge and blaze in mirrors.
One glimpses Saint Gabriel who was sculpted,
In the village, long ago, in the gold of the tabernacle;
Saint Raphael clothed in lightning and beauty;
And Saint Michael whose oracle the shepherdess heard.
Then suddenly, on earth, at the end of the plains,
Beneath an immense star with shifting fires
A stable lights up and the breaths
Of both a donkey and an ox smoke in the silver air,
In the light that comes forth
Mystical and gentle from its body,
A Virgin mends and arranges swaddling clothes,
And, near the threshold, where a lamb sleeps,
A carpenter makes a cradle,
With planks.
Without their seeing the halo that crowns them,
They work, both of them, silently
And from time to time pronounce
A divine name that astonishes them.
Around the walls and beneath the roof,
The atmosphere spreads so pure and so fervent
That one feels invisible knees bending
And that all life is in waiting.
Oh! you, the people, the old people,
Who watch passing through your villages
The emperors and the shepherds and the magi kings
And their beasts whose flock follows them,
All of you lean out at your windows,
To see at last, in the depths of the night,
What, for a thousand and a thousand years,
Has been striving to be born.
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-eternal-glow-emile-verhaeren/