The Man of Fatigue

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

This evening, the man of fatigue,
Watching the sea stretch limitless,
Under the reign of the despotic wind and the lightning,
With arms fallen, over there, sat down on my dike.

The garment of the fairest dreams,
The pride of brief human sciences,
The ardor, with no further surge of sap,
Fell, in tatters, upon his body:
This man was clothed in dead centuries.

He was no longer life,
He was not yet death;
He was unassuaged fatigue.

He had seen strange stones burn,
Long ago, in the braziers of thought:
The fires had licked the lashes of his eyelids
And his ardor had broken
On the winding stairway of the infinite.
His head had nourished all the glosses.
He dragged after him a grandiose wing
—Ridiculous—whose feathers fell;
Glassy clouds hung over him,
But nevertheless one last chimera
Lit with gold his helmet and his banner.

Weary of good, weary of evil, weary of all,
He still held upright
One last vow, under the assault of opposites:
Having seen so many necessary things sink,
Colliding for their fleeting truth,
He, who remembered being and having been,
Who could not die and who could not live,
Yet dared to love his weariness of following,
Between the beaten yeses of no, his path, alone.

Of every ardent thinker, he felt himself the ancestor.
The soil of the world was rotten with so many epochs
And the sun was so old!
And so many futilely victorious fists
Had stolen from the sky only baroque thunderbolts.
And it is decidedly: “Misery!” for all eternity
That across its planet and toward its stars
The pale and bleeding head of its disasters,
For a thousand and a thousand years, humanity will cry.

Certainly, but to nestle in the rare wisdom,
From which nothing shows but knowledge
And culture and the discipline of one’s weakness;
To reconcile hatred and desire; to will,
At every hour, to violate one’s malady;
To love it and curse it and feel it

Warm like a hearth poorly extinguished from fire,
To unfurl one’s sorrow and clothe oneself in it;
To have, from one’s very misfortunes, pride;
To love at last the one who, in the cities, passes
And who sits, smiling, before the threshold
Of the temple, where the men of his race go to pray.

And then to proclaim it, but to raise hope
Only to, slyly, strike it down with one’s hatred;
To thwart the dawn with the evening;
To torture the present with the next hour;
To find sweetness in one’s anguish, weary
Of no longer having fear of the threat;
Not to light with too great a fire
The enigma to be guessed beyond the clouds,
Which made the sages muse
That a known God is no longer a God.

This evening, the man of fatigue,
Quite slowly, has lifted up,
Like a treasure unearthed,
On the banks of the river, where my soul sails,
The science of fatigue.

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-man-of-fatigue-emile-verhaeren/