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Behold this solitary oak
With which the rock has crowned itself,
Speak to this age-old trunk,
Ask how it was born.
An acorn falls from the tree and rolls upon the ground,
The eagle with empty talons, leaving the valleys,
Seizes it in play and carries it to its eyrie
To sharpen the beak of its young eaglets;
Soon from the deserted nest that the tempest carries off,
It rolls mingled in the shifting debris,
And on the bare rock a grain of sand stops
The one that must one day break the wing of the winds;
The summer comes, the North Wind lifts
The dust of the furrows, which for it is but a game,
And on the extinguished germ where the sap still smolders
Lets a little fall back!
The spring with its tepid shower
Waters it as if with a hand;
This dust is fertilized
And life circulates in it at last!
Life! at that single word every eye, every thought,
Bows down confounded and dares not penetrate;
At the threshold of the Infinite is placed the boundary;
Where wise ignorance and senseless audacity
Meet to adore!
It lives, this giant of the hills!
But before appearing in the day,
It digs with its roots
Foundations like a tower.
It knows what struggle is preparing,
And that against the storm
It must seek support beneath the earth;
It knows that the resounding hurricane
Awaits it in the day!.. or, if it ignores it,
Someone at least knows it for it!
Thus when the young ship
Where the sailors rush,
Before facing its empire,
Wants to tame itself on the waves,
Letting its vast cable run,
Its anchor goes to seek the sand
Down to the bottom of the shifting valleys,
And on this mobile foundation
It balances its fragile mast
And sleeps in the vain rolling of the winds!
It lives! The superb colossus
That covers an entire acre
Barely exceeds the blade of grass
That the gnat makes bend!
But its leaf drinks the dew,
Its fertilized root
Swells like water in its course,
And in its heart that it fortifies
Circulates a blood drunk with life
For which centuries are days!
The furrows where the wheat turns yellow
Under the changing steps of the seasons,
Strip themselves and clothe themselves
Like a flock of its fleeces;
The river is born, rumbles and flows away,
The tower rises, ages, crumbles;
Winter strips the granite bare,
Countless generations
Live and die in its shadow,
And it? look! it grows young again!
Its trunk that the bark protects,
Fortified by a thousand knots,
To bear its leaf or its snow
Widens on its gnarled feet;
Its arms that time multiplies,
Like a wrestler who folds back
To better leap forward,
Throwing their elbows backward,
Curve back in the race
To better bear the weight of the wind!
And its vast and heavy foliage,
Spreading night around,
Extends, like a broad cloud,
Between the mountain and the day;
Like nocturnal phantoms,
The winds resound in its domes,
The birds come there to sleep,
And to salute the light
Rise like a dust,
If its leaf comes to tremble!
The ship, whose gaze implores
On the seas a sure beacon,
Sees it, all drowned in the dawn,
Pyramid in the distance!
Evening bends its great shadow
From the flanks of the dark hill
To the foot of the last slopes.
A single one of the hairs of its head
Shelters against the storm
Both the shepherd and the flocks!
And while in the wind of the hills
It rocks its inhabited roofs,
Empires in its roots,
Under its bark cities;
There, near the hives of the bees,
Arachne weaves her wonders,
The serpent hisses, and the ant
Guides to conquests of sand
Its innumerable multitudes
That a sleeping lizard crushes!
And these torrents of soul and life,
And this mysterious sleep,
And this rejuvenated sap
That rises with the sun;
This divine intelligence
That foresees, calculates, divines
And organizes itself for its end,
And this force that encloses
In an acorn the germ of the germ
Of beings without number and without end!
And these worlds of creatures
That, born and living from it,
Draw from it being and nourishment
In the centuries as today;
All that is but a fragile acorn
That falls on the sterile rock
From the beak of the eagle or the vulture!
It is but an arid dust
That the wind sows in its course
And that a ray of the day warms!
And I, I say: Lord! it is you alone, it is your force,
Your wisdom and your will,
Your life and your fecundity,
Your foresight and your goodness!
The worm finds your name engraved under its bark,
And my eye in its mass and its eternity!
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-oak-sequel-to-jehova-alphonse-de-lamartine/