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And it is along these lands of burial,
In these marshes, muddy for a thousand years,
That I moor, this evening, my desire for adventure,
Like a sudden sailboat fragile and violent.
I have abandoned, over there, the distant quays,
From which soared and sailed, in the mornings,
Unquenchable,
With the old booty of the world in its clear flanks,
With its flags rousing the air,
The Eternal, which is life.
Here, silence weighs with all its weight
On an enclosure bordered by dunes;
The oblique hands of the moon
Caress there, under the cold skies,
Enormous rows of white tombs.
Branches, like vertebrae,
Hanging, broken, around massive and heavy trunks;
Great birds of vair and velvet,
With torpid and slow flight, tread there the darkness.
Golden clepsydras, skulls and torches,
Hands of granite striking the threshold of porches,
Wings of stone and their iron feathers,
Yellow leaves strewn on the slabs,
Oh! all the autumn and all the winter
Of immemorial death.
Oh! the harsh scattered cemetery of human thought!
The rising Babel collapsed into tombs,
Where a whole splendor of hope and torches,
Against the ground, is crushed,
While above, always, the marvelous mysteries
Opening their espaliers of fire, in the firmament,
Stretch, but in the night, their diamond fruits
Toward the anguish of the earth.
Yet, have they launched into the depths of the skies,
To capture them,
Marvelous nets;
Have they fixed and adjusted,
One after the other, facts after facts;
Have they raised fragile ladders
Whose every rung reason steadied,
With agile fingers;
Have they built, to reach them,
From century to century and from age to age,
Never wearying, nor complaining,
White and marvelous scaffolds?
And nevertheless, here is the scattered cemetery,
The rising Babel collapsed into tombs,
Where thought is fragmented and dispersed
Into haggard blocks
And dismal torches.
It is that the one awaited has not come,
The one, whose whole nature
Will assemble, one day, the subtle matter
In powerful crucibles not yet known;
It is that the ardent and fine race,
Of which he will be the flower,
Has not multiplied its thousands of roots
To the very depths of the depths;
It is that the dead past still dominates and captures
Too strongly, all vigor of will,
For the mind, with a broad effort, to adapt
To its new environment of truth;
It is that every man, in short, does not listen enough
To the future sleep he holds, cradled within himself,
And which he hears under the great solemnized skies,
Dreaming, in divine words, at night, in silence.
My heart, is there a vow of joy and valor
More superb to form, than to be,
One day, the pure herald of this prodigy to be born;
Than to tame already for its wide victory,
The white horses of virgin pride and glory?
Oh you, my hands, remain clean and beautiful,
Oh you, my eyes, remain clear, but closed,
While awaiting the tranquil rebel
That the centuries will have subtly formed,
To discover, by dint of daring and genius,
The words that conceal all harmony
And unite our mind and the world,
In the two hands of a very simple profound law.
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-waiting-emile-verhaeren/