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Like a torso of stone and metal standing upright,
The monument of gold seethes in the shadows.
As soon as night is dead and day lives again,
The immense and red crossroads
Where its daily battle exults
Quivers.
Banks open early and their tellers’ windows,
Where gold is weighed on the balance scale,
See flock in — light sails — in fleets,
Drafts and banknotes.
A fury rises and escapes from it,
Reaches the street and spreads there,
Coming to heat, from threshold to threshold,
In the city, fear, madness, or pride.
The monument of gold waits for noon to strike
To awaken the ardor that grips its life.
So many dreams, like tawny fires,
Intertwine their flame and their eddies
From top to bottom of the mad palace!
Guilty and monstrous gain
Tightens there like knots.
One thinks one sees a harsh fever
Flying from brow to brow, from lip to lip,
And rioting and bursting
And crackling on the landings
And the steps of the staircases.
A rekindled fury
At the mirage of the slightest hope
Rises suddenly from the funnel
Of noise and smoke,
Where they fight, with blows of theft, below.
Dry tongues, sharp looks, inverted gestures,
And brains, through which millions swirl in whirlpools,
Exchange there their fear and their terror.
Haste simulates audacity
And audacities outdo one another;
Some confide to notebooks
Their anguish and their secrets;
Cynically, one discounts the lightning
That kills a people at the end of the world;
Chimeras fly in the air;
Chances flee or abound;
Deals concluded, deals broken
Struggle and butt against each other in disputes;
The air burns — and paradoxical figures,
In full bundles, in heavy clusters,
Are rejected and jolted and tossed about
And take fright in these brawls,
Until their weary sums,
Masses against masses,
Break.
At month’s end, when debacles are decided,
Death initials them with suicides
And the falls crumble into ruins
That light up
In exultant funerals.
But the very day, in the pallid hours,
Wills, in fever, live again;
Sly relentlessness
Resumes, as in the past.
They betray one another, smile at one another, and bite one another
And work toward other deaths.
Hatred rumbles like a machine
Around those it assassinates.
They rob, with authority, the people
Whose coffers are destitute.
They mix honor with swindling,
To prime even fatherlands
And to rouse toward the torrid and infamous gold
The universal frenzy.
Oh gold, over there, like towers in the clouds,
Gold spread out on the shelf of mirages,
With millions of arms stretched toward it,
And gestures and calls, in the night,
And the unanimous prayer that rumbles,
From one end of the world’s horizons to the other!
Over there, cubes of gold on triangles of gold,
And all around, famous fortunes
Scaffolding themselves on algebras.
Gold! — to drink and eat gold!
And, more ferocious still than the rage for gold,
Faith in the mysterious game
And its haggard and shadowy hazards
And its arbitrary certain wills
That restore the old destiny;
The game, terrible axis, around which will turn,
For the sole pleasure of anomaly,
For the sole need of rut and madness,
Over there, where the laws of dread cross
And the supreme disarrays,
Frantically, the passion to come.
Like a torso of stone and metal standing upright,
That conceals in its mystery and its deep ardor
The beating and gasping heart of the world,
The monument of gold seethes in the shadows.
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-stock-exchange-emile-verhaeren/