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The roofs seem lost
And the bell towers and the gables melted,
In these sooty and red mornings,
Where, fire to fire, signals move.
An enormous curved viaduct
Runs along the bleak and uniform quays;
A train starts up, immense and weary.
Over there,
A hoarse steamer with a sound of a horn.
And along the uniform and bleak quays,
And along the bridges and the streets,
Jostle, in their crowds,
On screens of raw mist,
Shadows and shadows.
An air of sulfur and naphtha exhales;
A troubled and monstrous sun spreads out;
The mind suddenly takes fright
Toward the impossible and the bizarre;
Crime or virtue, does it still see
What moves in these settings,
Where, before it, on the squares, exalts itself
With great wings, in the fog
A black eagle with a standard,
Between its basalt claws.
O the centuries and the centuries upon this city,
Great with its past
Ever ardent – and crossed,
As at this hour, by phantoms!
O the centuries and the centuries upon her,
With their immense and criminal life
Beating – since what times? –
Each dwelling and each stone
With mad desires or carnivorous rages!
Some huts at first and some priests:
The asylum for all, the church and its windows
Letting filter the light of sure dogma
And its naivety toward obscure brains.
Toothed dungeons, massive palaces, barbarous cloisters;
Crosses of popes that the world dreads;
Monks, abbots, barons, serfs and villeins;
Mitres of gold embroidery, silver helmets, linen vests;
Struggles of instincts, far from the struggles of the soul
Between neighbors, for the vain pride of a banner;
Hates of scepter to scepter and failed monarchs
On their false coin opening their fleur-de-lis,
Cutting the block of their justice with sword blows
And raising it and imposing it, coarse and brief.
Then, the draft, slow to be born, of the city:
Forces one wants to plant in law alone;
Nails of the people and jaws of kings;
Muzzles clenched in shadow and subterranean barking
Toward one knows not what ideal at the bottom of the clouds;
Tocsins churning, in the evening, unknown rages;
Torches of deliverance and salvation, standing
In the enormous atmosphere where revolt boils;
Books whose pages, suddenly intelligible,
Burn with truth, like the Bibles of old;
Divine and clear men, like monuments of gold
From which events emerge armed and strong;
Clear and new wills, new consciences
And mad hope, in all the brains,
Despite the scaffolds, despite the fires
And the heads in blood at the end of brandished fists.
She is a thousand years old, the city,
The harsh and deep city;
And ceaselessly, despite the assault of days
And of peoples undermining her heavy pride,
She resists the wear of the world.
What an ocean, her hearts! what a storm, her nerves!
What knots of wills tightened in her mystery!
Victorious, she absorbs the earth,
Vanquished, she is the attraction of the universe;
Always, in her triumph or her defeats,
She appears gigantic, and her cry rings and her name shines,
And the brightness made by her golden fires in the night
Radiates afar, even to the planets!
O the centuries and the centuries upon her!
Her soul, in these haggard mornings,
Circulates in each atom
Of heavy vapor and scattered veils,
Her enormous and vague soul, like her great domes
That blur in the fog.
Her soul wandering in each of the shadows
That cross her dark quarters,
With a new ardor at the end of their thought,
Her formidable and convulsed soul,
Her soul, where the past sketches
With the clear present the still awkward future.
O this world of fever and tireless flight
Hurled, with heavy and panting lungs,
Toward one knows not what troubling goals?
World promised yet to laws of gold,
To clear laws, which it still ignores
But which must, one day, be exhumed,
One by one, from the depths of the mists.
World today stubborn, tragic and pale
That puts its life and its soul in the very effort
That it projects, day and night,
At every hour, toward the infinite.
O the centuries and the centuries upon this city!
The old dream is dead and the new one is forging.
It is smoking in the thought and the sweat
Of arms proud with work, of brows proud with gleams,
And the city hears it rise from the depths of the throats
Of those who carry it within them
And want to cry it out and sob it to the heavens.
And from everywhere people come toward her,
Some from the towns and others from the fields,
Since always, from the depths of far away;
And the eternal roads are the witnesses
Of these marches, across time,
That rhythm themselves like blood
And quicken, continual.
The dream! it is higher than the smokes
That she sends back envenomed
Around her, toward the horizon;
Even in fear or in weariness,
It is over there, dominating, the nights,
Like those bushes
Of golden stars and black crowns,
That light up, in the evening, evocative.
And what do the ills and the mad hours matter,
And the vats of vice where the city ferments,
If some day, from the depths of the mists and veils,
A new Christ arises, sculpted in light,
Who lifts humanity toward him
And baptizes it in the fire of new stars.
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-soul-of-the-city-emile-verhaeren/