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Happy the eye enlightened by that cloudless day
That everywhere below contemplates and reads it!
Happy the heart enamored of that great image,
Always empty and deceived if God does not fill it!
Ah! for that one alone nature is its shadow!
In vain time veils itself and the heavens recede!
The sky has no abyss and time no number
That can hide it from these eyes!
For whoever does not see it there, all is night and mystery,
This alphabet of play scattered in the sky
Is like those vain characters
Whose meaning, if they have one, has been lost in time!
The scholar under his hands turns and breaks them
And says: This is but a play of a capricious art;
And a hundred times in falling these letters he despises
By themselves have written the mysterious name!
But this language, in vain by the ages led astray,
Is read yesterday as today;
For it has but one name beneath its sacred letter,
He alone! he everywhere! always he!
How sweet it is for the soul that thinks
And floats in immensity
Between doubt and hope,
Light and darkness,
To see this eternal idea
Shine ceaselessly above it
Like a star with constant fires,
Console it beneath its clouds,
And show it the two shores
Whitened with the foam of time!
In vain the waves of years
Roll in their ebb and flow
The abandoned beliefs
And the overturned empires
In vain opinion that struggles
In its triumph or in its fall
Drags a world to its decline;
It shines upon its ruin,
And the history it illuminates
Snatches its mystery from destiny!
It is the science of the sage,
It is the faith of virtue!
The support of the weak, and the pledge
For which the just have fought!
In it life has its judge
And misfortune its refuge,
And sorrow rejoices.
Unique key to the great mystery,
Remove this idea from the earth
And reason vanishes!
Yet the world, which forgets
The soul absorbed in its creator,
Accuses its faith of madness
And reproaches it for its happiness,
Like the bird of darkness
That, charmed by funereal glimmers,
Reproaches the bird of morning
For believing in the day just born
And for soaring before the dawn
Intoxicated by the divine ray!
But what does it matter to the soul that is flooded
By this day that nothing can veil!
It lets the world roll on
Without hearing it and without mingling with it!
Like a pearl of dew
That the broken wave makes leap
On resounding rocks,
There dries pure and virginal,
And alone into the heavens exhales
With light and incense!
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-the-idea-of-god-sequel-to-jehovah-alphonse-de-lamartine/