The Immobile Beauty, Poem by Emile Verhaeren

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

The immobile beauty
Of summer evenings,
Over the lawns where it unfolds,
Offers us the symbol
With no vain gesture, nor without speech,
Of rest in joy.

The young morning and its surprises
Have gone away, with the breezes;
Noon itself and the velvet folds
Of its warm winds, of its heavy winds
No longer fall upon the torrid plain;
And here is the hour when, slowly, evening,
Without the branch moving or the pond rippling,
Comes down from the mountains, into the garden, to sit.

O the golden flatness to the infinite of the waters,
And the trees and their shadows on the reeds,
And the tranquil and sumptuous silence,
Whose immutable presence
We then taste
So deeply,
That our wish would be to live or die of it
And to live of it again,
Like two hearts, endlessly drunk
With light, that cannot perish!

Emile Verhaeren

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