The River

Poem by Charles-Nérée Beauchemin Collection Patrie intimePeriod 19th century

Since the stormy age of the first dawns
When a whole sky rained upon a nascent world,
Followed by an infinite procession of rivers,
To the open sea, at full channel, in triumph, it descends.

Superb, delivered from the savage darkness
And from the enchantments of the black Spirits of evil,
It proclaims to the new suns of its shores,
Its noble holy name, its beautiful baptismal name.

Reflecting the hopes of obstinate races
Whose sons have known the tears of dark days,
The old river, the river with vast destinies,
The Saint Lawrence pursues its long voyage.

In vain the precipice irritates its power,
From abyss to abyss, it redoubles its leaps.
It passes. All the noise of its effervescence
In time, subsides into deep calms.

From the humblest coast to the highest promontory,
From upstream to downstream, all along its banks,
A hundred steeples, in the morning, celebrate its story,
And a hundred steeples, in the evening, modulate their chords.

It passes. What does it care for the tributes it absorbs?
Will it be more beautiful, greater, more glorious?
It passes, and we shall see dissolve in its orbit
The emerald and the azure of earth and skies:

But now the Sea dares to force the entrance
Of the estuary where rolls an ocean of waves:
Before the King of waters, the exasperated Sea
Recoils, and its wrath bursts into long sobs.

And the River, the old river, the immense river,
Whose breaths have not ceased to be alive,
Magnificent with calm and pride, begins again
Its march toward the dawn and the rising suns.

So, through the golden fields and the green plains,
This people that surges and overflows everywhere,
And that, under all skies, feels running in its veins,
The blood that put its purple in the veins of ancestors.

Illustrious people sprung from these divine sources
That can never decrease nor dry up,
It passes, scarcely moved by its distant courses,
Calm, tranquil, sure never to die.

Charles-Nérée Beauchemin

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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