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In your dreams, in your thoughts,
In your supple hand, in your strong arm,
In every tenacious impulse your body exerts
The active luck is gathered up.
Say, do you feel it, ready to leap
All the way to the end of your desire?
Do you feel it waiting for you, watching and insisting
To test nonetheless, and always, and again
For your courage and for your comfort
Fate?
Those who entrust to the waves both their goods and their lives
Are not unaware that it swerves
From any path too regular;
They are careful not to bind it
With bonds too hard to the mast of their fortune;
They all know that, like the moon,
It brightens and darkens at every moment
And that one must love its joy and its torment.
In your dreams, in your thoughts,
In your supple hand, in your strong arm,
In every tenacious impulse your body exerts
The active luck is gathered up.
And you love it all the more because it is risk and danger,
Because, balancing hope like a light lever,
It comes, goes and runs along a dancing thread.
It does not matter that calculation and prudence
Are surer paths for you to approach the goal.
You want the ardent effort that erases and excludes
No credulous move on the threshold of victory
And thus you nourish, as if in spite of yourself,
What still remains of your old faith
In your old contradictory heart.
Luck is like a leap that adds to the momentum
And suddenly straightens it at the moment it falters.
It reigns beyond the strict wisdom
And the precise, meticulous and slow order.
It is light force and its presence allies
Some unknown intense and subtle madness
With the punctual and searching work of brains.
It points out at once the new miracle.
Men whom glory summons to bright destinies
All, thanks to its help, have set their lives ablaze
With the flying red flame of exploits.
They cried out that fortune was their right
And cried it so loudly that they ended up believing
That they held the immense and white wing of victories
Under the clenched fists of their tenacity.
Oh! say, what would they not have succeeded in or attempted
In our age of pride, of strength and of vertigo
Where the world works at its own prodigy?
In your supple hand, in your strong arm,
In every tenacious impulse your body exerts,
In your dreams, in your thoughts,
The active luck is gathered up.
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-luck-emile-verhaeren/