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The spinster with her bands of black,
Who embroiders at dawn and embroiders at night,
Always at the same window,
Sits behind a green screen
And watches the street and the gray winter weather,
From her armchair stuffed with wool and comfort.
Two beguines have greeted the apothecary,
Very low, then left his threshold backward;
The sacristan has gone to the vicar;
The road mender has swept, with long strokes,
The sewer choked with filth and shaggy mire.
And now here comes,
At the hour of noon,
The jovial burgomaster
Who comes, stops, and long greets
The spinster at her window.
With his hands of rain and mist,
For days and then for days, December
Wets the walls, the roofs and the sheds;
Fortunately in her room,
The spinster with her bands of black
Can watch until evening
A joyful fire, where they light up and move,
Flames! your clear red butterflies.
She loves to live and isolate herself thus,
In the warmth and in the boredom;
While her big cat, purring with ease
Beside her, on a chair,
Watches her who slowly marries,
With her thin hands,
A yellow flower to the crimson bindweed
Of her tapestry.
The spinster
Nourishes in herself
The love of an unfaithful love,
Silently.
Only the priest who confesses her
Knows her fault and her weakness,
And what a torment her lover was!
They never speak of it, though they think of it
With sadness or violence,
When the priest, on Sundays, comes
To talk of everything, to talk of nothing,
Until the moment when, in the shadow and the mist,
The first streetlamp, at the edge of the quay, lights up.
The spinster in black has slowly faded,
Recounting in her soul the days
That were sweetness and deceit to her,
And that she loves and detests still.
In vain she nestles in her warm corner,
The shadow of her regrets and her mourning obsesses
Even the hour when the sun slips over her weary brow.
Whoever passes through the town might believe
That she watches, from the height of a bleak observatory,
For years, for someone who does not come.
And when the spinster has counted her sorrows,
How many times, over the years and weeks,
And when her sick and troublesome cat,
One evening, has closed its defunct eyes,
Surely, she will implore fate,
That it may lay her, in turn, in death;
Then,
For the first time, the jovial burgomaster,
At the hour of noon, passing on the sidewalk,
Will pass there, without greeting at her window,
The spinster with her bands of black.
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-old-maid-emile-verhaeren/