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Tranquil Lys, gentle and slow Lys
Whose wind cradles, at the edges, the grasses and the plants,
You surround our fields and our hamlets, over there,
With a thousand and a thousand meanders,
To better hold tightly, between your arms,
Flanders.
And you go and come back,
Without anguish and without tide,
Autumn, winter, summer, spring;
And you always have time,
Like the people of our lands.
And your course goes toward the poor houses
And the tall white steeples, whose four abat-sons
Cast toward the near day,
Each morning, the voice of the bells;
And the farms and the gardens and the russet meadows,
Whose edge you bathe,
All possess, to come down to you,
A stairway made in the earth;
And servants and washerwomen
Descend the shaky stone steps,
And one hears their voices singing from enclosure to enclosure,
And suddenly resounding, in the hamlets,
The echo,
When the flabby and overturned noise of buckets
Falls into the water.
On your dikes, tranquilly, at the foot of the willows,
An old stubborn fisherman holds his rod upright,
A staff of shadow, fixed and moving, over the clear waves;
White ducks, with yellow and glossy beaks, advance,
Sail and suddenly snap up the green watercress
That decorates the sinuous edges of your coves.
And rare barges pass in your gleams,
Slow and heavy barges drawn by the haulers,
Whose rope sometimes catches on your bushes,
While at the rudder, which he maneuvers with his loins,
Nonchalantly, pipe in teeth, hands in pockets,
The boatman leans and hums a refrain.
Tranquil and familiar Lys,
You are adored in the depths of towns and hamlets;
You reflect their mournings and skirt their ills,
Just as, in joyful times, you mirror in your waters
The processions, the garlands and the flags
Of parish kermesses.
And far away, over there, between Deinze and Kortrijk,
With your arms, your fists, your hands and your fingers of wave
You patiently ret the sacred flax,
You, the most supple worker in the world;
And your obscure labor is so mysterious,
In the depths of the heavy silt, the mud and the ashes,
That nowhere else, under the clarity of the skies
O Lys! cloth is as white as in Flanders.
And you gather at your sides the humble people
Who work gaily on their agile looms,
The fine fabrics brighter than snow and silver;
The weaver, bent toward his fragile wefts
Skillfully reties the broken and twisted threads
And the sun that slips between them its clear brightness,
Striking the winged back-and-forth of the shuttle,
Transforms it in passing into a sudden golden insect.
Even in the black days of mourning, peril and war,
You made yourself, O Lys, the sure ally
Of the old Flemish burghers against the French king:
Your waters, to save them, flooded the plain,
And the army mired its vengeance and its hatred
In the muddy trap of your secret marshes.
Thus, heroic, useful, loving and wise Lys,
Like a moving benefit you brush against the houses,
And you linger, in your long journey
So as not to forget anyone in the depths of the horizons.
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-lys-emile-verhaeren/